You all remember CARROT, right? The sadistic, sarcastic artificial intelligence that powers a collection of productivity and fitness applications has returned for a fifth app. The latest piece of software to join the CARROT family is CARROT Weather.
As you may have gathered from the title, this new app helps you track current and upcoming weather conditions with the snark that only CARROT can really nail. The Weather app is much simpler in presentation than its predecessors, but it’s just as robust as you’ve come to expect from this line of apps.
Running through the CARROT Weather setup takes only a minute. You’ll need to provide the app with permission to use your current location, or you can feed it a zip code or city name (after all, who wants an evil supercomputer knowing their exact location?).
Once CARROT has a location, you can view current temperature, weather condition, “feels like” temp, wind speed, and seven-day forecast. A quick tap on the bottom of the screen (or a swipe across the middle) will also bring up a short-term forecast that can predict the likelihood of rain up to an hour in advance, and another swipe can show you similar data for the entire day.
Each weather condition is accompanied by a scene of CARROT’s “meatbag” characters enjoying the sun, loathing the rain, or sitting on a park bench dejectedly eating a sandwich.
Swiping up anywhere on the screen will pull up a sheet with even more information, including moon phase, humidity, barometric pressure, visibility (for those foggy days), sunrise and sunset times, hourly weather data for today, and more specific daily information for the upcoming week.
Tapping the title bar at the top of the screen allows you to select a new location. Every location you add is kept on a list for easy access (and can be deleted from the app’s settings screen). This screen also allows you to access secret locations you’ve unlocked. You can unlock new secret locations by completing certain tasks within the app or adding specific real-life locations. There are a total of 21 secret locations to find, including Lord of the Rings‘ Mount Doom, Die Hard‘s Nakatomi Plaza, and the moon according to the app’s description. They’re not hard to find—I’ve found three so far, but none of those listed above—but some of them will require a little more work than others.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-STnUiuIhlw&feature=youtu.be&ab_channel=MeetCARROT]
Of course, no modern weather app would be complete without a Notification Center widget, so CARROT Weather comes with one of those, too. The simple widget presents a four-day forecast and current weather conditions (“It’s sunny! Ha ha, just kidding, it’s raining.”), and doesn’t do anything special when you tap it.
As for accuracy, CARROT Weather’s data is provided by Forecast.io, which says it’s raining outside right now. I checked, and it’s definitely not. However, I checked the built-in iOS Weather app and it also says it’s currently raining, so it seems CARROT is no less accurate than the stock application.
As with previous apps in the series, CARROT Weather injects a bit of fun into what’s usually a pretty mundane task. To celebrate the launch, the app is available for $2.99 (25% off the regular price) on the App Store for a limited time.
Other CARROT applications include the original to-do manager, an alarm clock, a 7-minute workout, and a calorie tracker.
