Yesterday morning, I got obsessed with the 10-day forecast section of the Apple Weather iOS app—specifically, how it presents each day’s temperature range. I still don’t understand the logic behind it.
The blog post is impressive, but the footnote contains a straight-up murder:
Several readers on Mastodon told me the alignment was fine on their phones and suggested Larger Text/Dynamic Type as the reason the charts on my phone are messed up. They were absolutely right. I bumped up my text size so long ago I’d forgotten all about it, but I should’ve known to look into that before posting. Interestingly, moving my text size down just one tick got all the bar ends to match up. The colors still seem a little off to me, but I’ll need to zoom in and look more carefully.
Of course, this still doesn’t answer the question of how the app is deciding where to put the bars and how to adjust the colors when the text size is large. Nor does it excuse Apple’s Weather team for failing to get the alignment right for all the text sizes they allow. Do they just assume the system will fix everything, or do they throw up their hands and say we far-sighted oldsters can just deal with it?