This article seems to be underestimating how much RAM a weather app should take. A well thought-out, native Weather app wouldn't take more than 100 mb of RAM.
This article seems to be underestimating how much RAM a weather app should take. A well thought-out, native Weather app wouldn't take more than 100 mb of RAM.
This has strong "How much could a banana cost? 10 dollars?" vibes.
Back in my day 100MB was all you had for all your compute, and somehow programs still ran.
Back in my days, I had to remove the mouse driver from autoexec so that microprose grand pirx had 600kb of ram to start
Had to get a ride to drive floppies with corrected config.sys and autoexec.bat files around to friends.
Things weren’t actually worse.
Personally, I have reverted back to sneakernet in a lot of what I do.
Good times.
When RAM was $100 per MB that would be $10,000. You can do a weather app in much less provided you use native code.
LumiWeather for AmigaOS runs on 2 MB RAM.
ESP32 in my OpenSprinkler pulls the weather (among a few more things it does) just fine and it has 520 kilobytes or RAM total.
Windows really I'd shitty for "assuming" unlimited ram, storage, processing, internet budget for them to get away with it.
They "could" make it easy but why bother? I assume next update will make calculator 1 gb download, 2gb ram resident and ADS
> Back in my day
Back in my day systems used to be a lot simpler too. These “back in my mind” comparisons show a clear lack of understanding of the subject matter. 1996 apps are not the same as 2026 apps. Expectations are different. Design languages are different. Even the UX is entirely different.
1GB is clearly overkill, no question. But ~100MB to ~300MB is perfectly reasonable and you know it.
Yeah I wrote it a bit tongue in cheek, but even then I can't help but wondering where is all that memory needed.
My best guess is the GUI is somehow really heavy, wouldn't expect a simple console program that connects to some weather API to require that much RAM. But I never worked on apps like this, so no clear idea.
99% of apps have the same or less functionality today as they did in 2001, but are significantly slower and worse.
Functionality isn't everything. A human teller has the (more or less) same functionality as online banking, but I do love me some online banking.
I also like the weather icons being 4K and having some smooth anmiations.
Not to say that it's gone worse (it has IMHO) but comparing 25 years ago to know doesn't help much. Times were different back then. That's like comparing 1900 travel to today.
What is the weather app doing that it requires 100MB? For such a simple application, that seems excessive.
Mostly rendering. A bunch of images, text, UI elements. On a modern high resolution display it adds up quite quickly. You can surely cut it down a bit, but 100MB isn't absurd.
A weather widget using 8 bit color plus alpha on a 4k display show three full size images in 100mb. But I suspect that's not the ux we're talking about here, and a widget style system has no excuse.
Apple's Weather app has an animated background, glassy views, and nice animations like water droplets on the glassy views when it's raining. So rendering all that on a 4k or more display at 10bit depth is going to consume a bit of RAM. However I guess it can surely be improved to make it consume less RAM.
https://wttr.in/ shows it's very possible.
The display on that page is literally broken for me, the boxes are all misaligned. It seems like it can't handle Japanese text correctly. Properly working localization in dozens of languages is one of those things that adds "bloat" to modern software that was missing in the bad old days.
Vector icons. It can be fit under 50MBs.
Those still have to be rasterised to a pixel-based frame buffer at render/compositing time.
Yes but that space would have existed anyway for a window of that size regardless of its contents.
Use an svg.
Or render everything using css, 100mb is someone not trying. 1gb is absurd abuse that only domestic violence victims put up with.
SVG is an on-disk format. It has to be rasterized, otherwise how do you have pixels? Each pixel takes up memory.
Quite a tasteless metaphor, no?
If I full-screen it in high enough resolution it can be excused for using 100MB temporarily.
The window in the article wasn't very big. At most it would have about 10MB of framebuffer, and the images on display would fit into 1MB uncompressed.
We can't excuse typical program waste with screen sizes. Especially when you can switch to 1080p or 720p and watch them still use massive amounts of memory.
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I think this depends on your location, because in some places you really want to view a radar map. "Rain in $CITY" is practically useless for me. Still, the (static?) map in the depicted app shouldn't take 1GB.
My favorite '90s weather app was WetSock. The installer was 1.5MB, though I don't recall the RAM usage. It showed a sunny/cloudy/etc. icon in the system tray, with the temperature in a tooltip:
https://web.archive.org/web/20010210023051/http://www.softse...
https://web.archive.org/web/20070210195451/http://www.locutu...
I am pretty sure xfce4 weather plugin takes a lot less.
Looks like about 30 MiB with a quick test.
You don't need anything more than https://wttr.in/ even with all the fancy terminal graphics.
They also have a nice API where you can pull the raw weather data and fancy it up any way you like graphically. Great for building your own entirely custom weather widget for your desktop, webpage, app, or whatever. :)
Why would I like to know the weather in some other city?
What do you mean? It gets the weather for your city via your IP address, maybe you're on a VPN.
Your IP address doesn't automatically correspond to your city, even without a VPN.
Then add your city as an argument to the curl. It works well enough regardless and doesn't use hundreds of megabytes of RAM which is what the initial complaint was.
Well it's comparing it to apple's weather app, which is a fair comparison I suppose. 100mb still sounds like at least an order of magnitude too high to me though.