Ocula
The free and open-source progressive weather app
About
Ocula is a weather app built entirely using modern web standards in an attempt to create a great looking weather app that anyone can use on any device while also providing a simple PWA template for developers to build upon.
I set out to create Ocula as a replacement for my favourite weather app - Pocket Weather, which was unfortunately shut down at the end of 2019 due to high maintenance costs.
Features
- No location restrictions - available worldwide
- Daily forecast for up to 8 days
- Hourly forecast data for up to 24 hours
- Trend charts for hourly temp, rainfall and wind
- Ocean tide information with tide height trend chart
- Interactive weather maps with 6 different map types (radar, precipitation, temp, cloud, wind, pressure)
- Frame-by-frame playback for radar images to visualise incoming rain
- Dark/Light Themes. Default theme changes based on current time of day
- Options to reorder or hide forecast sections, set your prefferred map type, units and more
- Open-source, privacy friendly, and best of all - free
Philosophy
The goal of this project is to satisfy the following:
- Must be open-source and freely available to all.
- Must be ad-free, subscription-free and any revenue generated to be used for ongoing maintenance costs.
- Must be built entirely using free (or freemium) services/assets (including hosting, api's, graphics etc.).
- Must be fast, lightweight, accessible and beautiful.
It is my hope that by satisfying the above conditions Ocula can be a weather app for all to enjoy without being bombarded with ads and signups.
However, as a result of satisfying the above conditions it is therefore not sustainable without some form of monetisation. For the most part I use free tiers of various services to ensure the app remains free but with increased usage I will personally incur the cost and may be forced to shutdown the service should costs become burdensome. For this reason I ask that you consider one of the following:
- If you like Ocula and use it as your everyday weather app I ask that you please consider contributing a regular small donation to the project (see donating) to help ease the cost of maintenance.
- If you are a developer you are free to fork this repository and host your own copy in accordance with the MIT licence.
Donating
Please consider donating to the ongoing development of this project by visiting my Patreon page.
Credits
- Weather forecast provided by OpenWeatherMap.
- Tidal information provided by WorldTides.
- Precipitation map tiles provided by RainViewer.
- Maps and geocoding services provided by MapBox.
- Logo designed by Ethan Roxburgh.
- Icons provided by Remix Icons.