Weather map, a fun project
I love the wind view in Apple Weather. Thousands of tiny lines drifting across the map, and you just see the weather instead of reading it. It can’t be embedded anywhere, so I rebuilt it for the browser.
What it does:
- Wind, rain, heat. Switch layers top left. Wind flows as coloured particles, rain and temperature fade in as soft colour fields.
- The whole world, 48 hours. Drag the timeline at the bottom and watch fronts roll in.
- Tap anywhere. A pin drops and a small card shows temperature, wind, humidity and chance of rain for the next 12 hours, in local time.
- Clocks. Tap the clock to switch time zones or add a second one. Handy when half your team sits in New York.
Under the hood it’s deliberately small: a single static page, no backend, no build step, no cost. MapLibre and OpenFreeMap draw the map, Open-Meteo delivers the forecast, OpenStreetMap names the places. All free and open.
The fun part was the design detail: calm glass panels on an 8-pixel grid, particles slow enough to feel like air rather than noise, and a map tinted in the same deep blue as the original.
The honest part: free weather data has limits. Every grid point counts as one request, so the global grid is coarse and small showers get smoothed out. For a side project that’s fine. It’s about the feeling, not the forecast.
Have a play and tell me what’s missing.