Sunstone

Sunstone is a weather web application designed to make reading the temperature and condition for the next few days quick and enjoyable. It pulls data from the National Weather Service for the hourly graph and daily summary, and optional current condition data from any Ambient Weather internet connected weather station (with a provided API key).

Sunstone

While the current web application iteration of Sunstone has been in active development since 2024, Sunstone has been a project in development earnestly since 2018, and as such it has taken many names and targeted many platforms. After attempting somewhat successfully to build an Android application, an iOS and MacOS app, and even a terminal tool, I settled eventually on a web application so I could target many devices more easily.

Philosophy

Sunstone was born out of the death of multiple beloved mobile weather apps, and a desktop web counterpart. This left myself, and many friends and family without a simple, uncluttered way to see the next few days at a glance. The guiding principles behind Sunstone’s design could be summed up as “Quick and Honest.” I didn’t want to do any extra processing of the data from the NWS that could be misinterpreted, and I didn’t want to take up any of the user’s time scrolling through pages of information they weren’t there for.

The first step in making any design is research, and for several months I used almost every weather app I could find (that was reasonably usable; you’d be surprised). I took extensive notes on which apps did what right, and much to the chagrin of my friends and family and even acquaintances and sometimes near strangers, asked them for their continued input on how and what they used for weather prediction. After initial concepts, I built several prototypes that have gone through the cycle of user feedback to bring us to where we are now.

Sunstone’s Figma archive

Sunstone’s current implementation is the result of probably hundreds of hours of trial and error, and learning about the design principles that produce beautiful and usable applications. The earliest designs focused too much on aesthetic qualities and fanciful visual effects like the live weather representations that lived behind the interfaces of the iOS weather app and several others. Over time I dedicated myself to a form from function approach, and have come to really appreciate how far a usable design can go with a little bit of polish and seasoning. A great aspect of its functional simplicity is its responsiveness. The same page can flawlessly accommodate the narrow resolution of a mobile device and the large display of a desktop, without any complicated media queries or breakpoints for varied resolutions; just thoughtful use of flexible containers.

Visual Style

Since Sunstone has been a project I’ve worked on for years, it’s a project that really shows how much I’ve learned and grown as a designer. One aspect I’m particularly proud of is the condition icon set. There are a lot of freely available weather icon projects out there, but very few cover the specific range of conditions with the particular brand of clarity and craft that I require. I learned a lot about the capability and implementation of SVG in the process, and cleaned the code up by hand for every icon.

Sunstone’s custom icon set

Choosing a theme in Sunstone’s settings

Similar to The Board, there is a theme engine that allows the entire applications colors to change on the fly, including individual elements of the animated icons like the rain or lightning. All colors have also been tested for WCAG 2.1 contrast and readability.

Future Plans

Eventually I would like Sunstone to provide more general information about what’s happening in the atmosphere. Some info I plan on adding:

• Aurora forecast
• Celestial events like meteor showers
• Sunrise and sunset times, along with quality predictions for expressive skies

With these additions I will also expand the user settings to allow for reordering information, and hiding any info they don’t find useful, laying the groundwork for a more generalized dashboard system as well.

I’ve enjoyed working on Sunstone thus far and have learned more than I could have ever hoped. It’s finally starting to become something I really enjoy using and has become my genuine daily driver for weather. Hopefully sometime soon it will be a publicly available in some capacity and it can become your favorite weather app too.