Two machines
The later one has the sunset gradient most people picture. The earlier one is its own reconstruction, with flat blue pages, all capitals, and its own letters and palette. Flip the switch at the top of this page to see both.
Cable WeatherWeather
The local forecast,
on a loop.
A rebuild of the box your cable company used to run the local forecast. It draws your real National Weather Service forecast the way that hardware did, with smooth jazz underneath.
Coming soonHow it works
Best viewed from a hotel bed.
It draws the screens
the way the box did.
The later machine draws into a 768 by 480 picture through a 256-color palette, 6 bits per channel, and every pixel on screen goes through that palette. The letters are bitmaps stamped in byte by byte, with no fonts and no smoothing. The pixels aren’t square, because a CRT’s weren’t. The blocky radar and the slightly off blues come out of all that.
What’s on the loop
Six screens, around and around
Current conditions, nearby stations, radar, the local and extended forecasts, and the almanac. Conditions and forecasts come from the National Weather Service, the radar from the Iowa Environmental Mesonet, and the almanac is worked out on your device.
The crawl
The ticker along the bottom moves 4 pixels a frame, matched to an old broadcast recording. It moves by shifting where the screen starts reading instead of redrawing, the way the hardware did. The rest of the picture only redraws when the page turns.
Radar the old way
Six frames covering the last 25 minutes of NEXRAD radar, sorted into intensity steps and drawn over the land with state and county lines. That’s why the storms look blocky.
A few more things
Pick your cable
Clean, S-Video, composite, or RF, applied after the palette. Composite is what most of us actually saw, with color smearing sideways and dot crawl on the edges. It starts on composite; switch to Clean if you’d rather have sharp pixels. There’s also a setting that flips bits in the color table, like a video chip that’s getting old.
Alerts
On iPhone and iPad, severe weather warnings in the National Weather Service’s own words, plus an optional forecast summary as often as you want one. Quiet hours are on by default.
Everywhere a TV would be
Widgets, StandBy, the Top Shelf on Apple TV, and your own message in the crawl along the bottom (on the later machine).
Smooth jazz, through
a TV speaker.
Thirteen licensed instrumental tracks (lounge, smooth jazz, a little bossa nova), processed to sound like they’re coming out of a TV: thin low end, the broadcast treble ceiling, squashed dynamics. It shuffles through all thirteen before it repeats one. On iPhone and iPad it opens quiet and starts when you press a volume button, so it won’t cut off your podcast. Apple TV starts with sound. Underneath it there’s a faint TV hum and hiss. It starts in the middle, and you can turn it down, up, or off.
Kevin Stauss
Dad, videographer, app maker
I kept finding apps that drew something close to the old cable forecast and got the details wrong: smooth fonts, too many colors, a ticker that scrolled like a web page. So I started rebuilding the box itself, down to its color table, and let the look come out of that.
More about meQuestions
Cable Weather privacy policyIs this the real weather?
Yes. Conditions, forecasts, and alerts come from the National Weather Service, and the radar is NEXRAD imagery from the Iowa Environmental Mesonet. It covers the 50 states, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands.
Is it affiliated with a TV network?
No. Cable Weather is an independent app. It isn’t affiliated with or endorsed by any television network, cable provider, or weather service, and it has no network branding or original broadcast music.
Can I turn the music off?
Yes. There are three volume levels and an off switch. On iPhone and iPad it doesn’t start until you press a volume button or touch a sound control.
Does it work with VoiceOver?
Yes. VoiceOver reads a plain English description of each screen, built from the weather data, and on iPhone and iPad there’s a plain-text view of current conditions one tap away.
Something isn’t working. Who do I tell?
Email kevin@silicroncode.com. It comes straight to me, and it helps to know which device you’re on and which market you picked.
Do I have to buy it for each device?
No. One purchase covers iPhone, iPad, and Apple TV, with no subscription and no in-app purchases.