weather

Last week, Apple announced that its App Store is approaching 50 billion app downloads. In celebration of the milestone, Apple is giving away a $10,000 App Store gift card to the lucky person who initiates the 50 billionth download.

As part of the celebration, Apple listed the top 25 apps -- both free and paid -- for iPhone and iPad. None of the apps listed is particularly surprising (especially to someone who studies the most-popular list every day), but one thing that did strike me is that a lot of the all-time best sellers still sit near the top … Read more

Yahoo Weather is a weather app that displays stunning Flickr photos as a backdrop to a wide range of weather information on your iPhone -- more than you get with Apple's weather app. There are certainly other options with more weather information, but for a quick look at what's happening in your area, Yahoo Weather is a good-looking and well-made app.

When you launch Yahoo Weather, you'll be asked immediately if the app can use your location so it can give you information on the weather around your area. From there you'll be presented with a … Read more

If you have used the new Yahoo Weather app for any amount of time, then you've seen the beautiful photos it displays to match a location, time of day, and current conditions. If you have a Flickr account, you can add your own photos to be considered for the app. And you can upload directly from your iPhone, using the Flickr app. Here's how:

Launch the Flickr app and tap the More button (the one with the blue and pink dots) in the lower-right corner.

Next, tap Search. From the Search screen, tap the Groups button below the … Read more

It's not often you come across a new app that deserves consideration for a spot on your iPhone's home screen, but the new Yahoo Weather for most likely will have people giving your current weather apps the boot. I use a mix of the stock iPhone weather app and The Weather Channel app, but will now turn to the Yahoo Weather app first.

The most interesting feature of the Yahoo Weather app is its integration with Yahoo-owned Flickr. It features Flickr photos to match not only the location you are looking at, but also the time of day … Read more

What would happen if you could take "The A-Team" and "Storm Chasers" and put them together in a blender? You'd get something like Tornado Junkies.

As their name suggests, this trio of young men are crazy about tornadoes. So crazy they think they can build a tornado-proof van.

Yes, this $5,000 Kickstarter project wants your money to build an armor-plated Ford to carry these Des Moines dudes down Tornado Alley chasing twisters. … Read more

Yahoo on Thursday released a Mail app for iOS and Android tablet users and a Weather app for iPhone owners.

A Yahoo Mail app has already been in play for the iPhone and Android smartphones, but the new version takes advantage of the larger screen size of tablets. A full-screen reading mode lets you flip through your e-mail messages as if you were reading a magazine.

Flipping through messages this way feels so much more natural than having to tap on each e-mail in the inbox to read it, especially on a tablet. It's an innovative and welcome approach, … Read more

YoWindow for iPhone is a miniaturized version of the highly-praised Windows counterpart; it's a full-screen weather app complete with animated visualizations of "real time" weather.

The iPhone version comes with five main animated landscapes, each with their own distinctive look and feel. Each animated landscape comes with subtle yet dynamic features that evoke an incredible sense of calm. Stare at a landscape long enough, and you'll notice trees swaying in the background, birds flying off in the distance, airplanes taking off, and more. It's one of those apps that makes your phone a perfect desktop … Read more

Now that winter has passed, those of us who live in cold climes can once again appreciate the beauty of snowflakes without feeling the urge to curse them for making us dig out the shovel. And if ever snowflakes looked lovely, it's in these images shot by a high-speed camera system developed specifically to photograph them in 3D as they fell.

"Until our device, there was no good instrument for automatically photographing the shapes and sizes of snowflakes in free fall," says Tim Garrett, an associate professor of atmospheric sciences at the University of Utah and one of the developers of the cam known as MASC, or Multi-Angle Snowflake Camera. "We are photographing these snowflakes completely untouched by any device, as they exist naturally in the air."

MASC -- under development for three years -- takes 9- to 37-micron-resolution stereographic photographs of snowflakes from three angles while simultaneously measuring the speed of their fall, a highly influential factor in the location and lifetime of a storm. … Read more