Why the idle moment goes to a feed
You are waiting for a kettle, a bus, a meeting to start. Your hand finds the phone before you have decided anything. There is nothing in particular you want from it, and that is the problem: a phone with nothing to show you is a black screen, and a black screen is a little uncomfortable to stare at.
So the moment goes to whatever is always ready. A feed is always ready. It will fill thirty seconds, and then it will fill ten minutes, because it has no reason to stop. You put the phone away knowing a lot of things about strangers and nothing new about anybody you love.
The advice is usually to leave the screen black. That is good advice and hard to keep, because it asks you to choose nothing over something. A better option would be something small that is worth the look and then lets you go. We made the longer case for that in calm technology and the case for a glance.
What weathr does
It shows a reading you cannot find anywhere else. No news site and no feed can tell you how your family, your friends or your team are right now. weathr can, because each of them says it with one tap: one of five symbols, sun, sun and cloud, cloud, rain or storm. Every half hour the group's moods are added together and drawn as a sky.
The reading is a picture, not a page. There are no words to read in the sky itself. Sun over your friends, rain over your family since Tuesday: you take it in the way you take in the weather through a window, in the time it takes to look.
It is true, not recent. A mood stands until the person changes it, so what you see is how people are, not what somebody happened to post last. As moods age the signal is drawn weaker, so an old reading does not pretend to be a fresh one.
It is also bigger than your groups. Wherever there is even one person, there is weather: your street, your city, your country. You can look at the map or watch a place you are not in. Places show moods, never people.
And then it is done. There is no feed underneath the sky. Saying how you are keeps your groups live for between an hour and a day, and when that runs out the sky stops moving until you speak again. The glance is the whole visit. Your screen time barely notices it.
A widget is being built. The Android app, with a home-screen widget you can cast from without opening anything, is in progress. Today weathr runs in any browser.
What it can't tell you
weathr tells you that a group is rainy, not why. It is the glance that tells you to message somebody, not the message. A reading is only as honest as the taps behind it, and it can't make anybody tap: a group whose members have gone quiet shows a weak signal, which is true but not informative.
And a glance is not always news. Most of the time the sky over your people is roughly what it was an hour ago. That is the point, but it means weathr will not entertain you. If you want something to fill ten minutes, a feed will do that better.
Compared with the other things a phone offers
| A feed | A black screen | weathr | |
|---|---|---|---|
| What you learn | Whatever ranks next | Nothing | How your people are |
| How long it takes | As long as it holds you | No time | A glance |
| Where it ends | It doesn't | Already over | After one look |
| What it asks of you | Attention | Nothing | One tap, now and then |
Questions
What can I look at on my phone instead of scrolling?
Something that ends. weathr shows one reading about the people you know: each group's moods drawn as a sky of sun, cloud, rain or storm. It takes a glance, tells you something no feed can, and has nothing below it to scroll into.
What is a glanceable app?
An app that gives its whole answer in the time it takes to look. weathr's answer is a picture with no words in it: the weather over a group, which is the proportion of its members' moods. You read it the way you read a sky out of a window.
Is weathr calm technology?
It is built on the same idea: sit at the edge of your attention and take the centre of it only briefly. weathr has no feed, no likes and no infinite scroll, and the view stops moving by itself a while after you last said how you are.
Is there a weathr widget?
An Android app with a home-screen widget, for casting in one tap without opening anything, is being built. Today weathr works in any browser, on a phone or a computer, and the live demo needs no account.