Windows 8.1: The Missing Manual

Weather

This app opens into a lovely, colorful weather report. Right off the bat, you see the current weather (as though the full-screen background photo didn’t give it away). There’s the five-day forecast (Figure 4-48). In a panel on the right (past the tutorial section, if you haven’t hidden it), you see the hour-by-hour forecast for today, so you can see exactly what time your softball game will get rained out.

Figure 4-48. More features appear when you open the App bar. Places lets you enter cities or Zip codes whose weather you check often. Weather Maps opens animated maps (see Figure 4-49). Ski Resorts could be an app in itself: It’s a live table of snow statistics about every ski resort known to Microsoft. And World Weather shows current conditions in major cities.

Most people probably never bother drilling past this screen, but there’s much more to do here. For example, you can choose the right arrow () to check out the next five days’ forecast. Or you can choose the expand-o-triangle () to open up a new row of details—wind speed, visibility, humidity, barometer, and the predicted highs and lows. You pilots know who you are.

But the most surprising part of the Weather app is the ...