Carrot Weather’s watch app now speaks to you

Your favorite weather robot now speaks to you through your Apple Watch’s speaker.

Carrot Weather, Brian Mueller’s popular weather app for iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch and Mac, today released a thoroughly revamped watch app featuring a bunch of powerful capabilities not found in any other watchOS weather app.

Aside from the new look, Carrot Weather for Apple Watch brings rich app customization, a cool speech synthesizer, full text weather alerts, animated radar and much more.

Speech synthesizer is perfect considering this is basically a weather robot with a personality: now you can enjoy hilarious spoken forecasts on your Apple Watch, just like on iPhone (third-party speaker access is one of the many new developer features in watchOS 4).

The app’s watch face complications can now be customized to show cloud cover, weather alerts and the temperature in Fahrenheit and Celsius side by side.

The ability to customize with the data points I care about is my basic requirement for wrist-based weather apps. On that front, the new Carrot Weather for Apple Watch delivers.

You can customize the data points for each of the four slots using the iPhone app. Then simply double-tap the current forecast section in the watch app to show or hide the second row of data points, or swipe for even more data points.

To track oncoming storms with animated radar, use Force Touch to choose the Radar option from the hidden menu (you can also access your Location and Settings interface from there).

You can also read the full text of active weather alerts in your area.

Storm tracking is a US-only feature that requires an Ultrapremium Club subscription.

Lastly, Carrot Weather’s watch app includes improved rich notifications packed with more detail than before. For an in-depth overview of all the changes and new features in Carrot Weather 4.3, I suggest reading Ryan Christoffel’s review on MacStories.

In the meantime, check out the app’s changelog to get a feel for other improvements:

  • Watch app redesign—My gorgeous new interface is easy to read at a glance—even when you’re running for your life from an abominable snowman.
  • App customization (Premium Club only)—Pick up to four different data points to display, fine-tune the forecast summary and choose how many days to show in the extended forecast.
  • Speech synthesizer—I may have miniaturized my speech synthesizer to fit on a tiny watch, but don’t worry: my insults will sting just as much as when they were coming from your iPhone.
  • Severe weather alerts—Read the full text of active weather alerts right from your wrist. Finally, a reason to look forward to a Nuclear Winter Warning!
  • Radar (Ultrapremium Club only)—Want to track an oncoming highstorm, everstorm or regular storm? Just press firmly to access animated radar for your current location. (Note: radar is currently only available in the U.S.)
  • New complications—My watch face complications can now be customized to show cloud cover, weather alerts and the temperature in Fahrenheit and Celsius side by side.
  • Updated dialogue—The pool of dialogue available in my Watch app has swelled dramatically and now syncs up with the personality you set in my iPhone app.
  • Politics setting (iPhone and iPad)—Because there are “good” “people” on both sides, I’ve added a setting to my personality screen that lets you change my political orientation. You can also turn off political commentary completely.
  • Miscellaneous—In addition to fixing some bugs left behind by my idiot Maker, I included some haptic feedback and an option to display Fahrenheit and Celsius temperature units side by side in the Current Forecast customization screen.

This update is free to existing users of the app.

As a quick reminder, Carrot Weather’s iPhone and iPad app features an augmented reality mode that uses Apple’s ARKit framework in iOS 11.

Carrot Weather 4.3 for iPhone, iPad and Apple Watch is $4.99 on App Store.

Carrot Weather for Mac is $11.99 on Mac App Store.