If 2001: A Space Odyssey‘s prickly AI, HAL 9000, picked up a sense of humor and then decided to make weather apps, the results would probably be a bit like Carrot Weather.
The sarcastic weather app has been a fixture on iOS for more than half a decade, and has not only gotten more hilariously abrasive during that time, but more useful as well. On Thursday, creator Brian Mueller unleashed the app’s latest update.
Carrot Weather, version 5.2, adds a bevy of nifty new features. In the words of the developers, these include:
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Customization Overhaul. The “build your own weather app” feature introduced in v5.0 proved to be hugely popular with users, so I put a lot of effort into making it much faster and easier to use. There are new options, the ability to see live previews of each section so you can see the changes to your layout as you make them, and a way to manage multiple layouts for quick switching between them.
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New Sections. Add the new Maps and Alerts sections to your layout to help you track incoming severe weather. The Maps section includes a bunch of customizable options, including zoom level, map style, and up to 2 map layers (i.e. radar, storm cells, tropical storms, etc). (The Maps section requires an Ultra membership.)
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Fonts & Text Sizes. Choose from five different fonts (and yes, one of them is just a “joke” font) and a multitude of text sizes. Customizable text sizes are very useful for a weather app since you can adjust the size to show more weather data without having to scroll.
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Tide Data. Monitor the rise and fall of sea levels. (Requires an Ultra membership.)
Carrot Weather is a free download. However, as suggested above, there are different tiers available for those who want to use more than the basic features.
Premium will cost you $4.99 per month or $19.99 per year. This includes extra information on weather data sources, customization possibilities, widgets, Apple Watch complications, and more. Premium Ultra, meanwhile, is $9.99 per month or $39.99 per year. It offers the same features as Premium, with extra rain, lightning, and storm cell notifications, rapid data source switching, and a weather map widget. Finally, Premium Family — costing $14.99 per month or $59.99 — offers Premium Ultra features, but is sharable with up to five family members.
If you’ve not used Carrot Weather previously, don’t be fooled by its jokey aesthetic. This is a surprisingly powerful tool that is definitely one of the better weather apps out there. Consider the sarcastic sense of humor just a premium cherry on top.
You can download Carrot Weather from the App Store here.
