You ever have one of these moments? You’re sitting there in front of your computer, you know you’re gonna have to begrudgingly leave your house at some point in the day, and you wanna know how the weather is but your eyes couldn’t possibly handle the UV burst that would come with actually pulling back the curtain and leaving your Elven WoW girlfriend behind? Me neither. But seriously, how nice would it be to have a virtual representation of a window on your iPhone? And I swear to Christ, don’t post links to webcams that look out windows in the comments.

Thankfully, a developer has answered your prayers: Outside for iPhone. Outside is a weather app, but it’s the most beautiful weather app I’ve ever seen. There are only three screens in Outside. There’s a window view that shows you current conditions and a forecast for the days ahead. Each day gets its own full-screen image. You switch days by swiping left and right through the week. Whether it’s going to be sunny, cloudy, rainy, or the white death, each day is displayed through beautiful cartoony animations. The middle icon at the bottom is a clock. Here you can set up notifications to let you know if the temperature will rise above or fall below a specified temperature. You can also be alerted if it’s gonna rain or if you’ll be needing sunscreen. You can set these to occur at any time during the day, and could be very useful.

At times, the accuracy that Outside registers swipes is iffy. There were plenty of times where if I started my swipe too far to the left or right, it didn’t respond. It wasn’t that bad, but it was enough to annoy me on occaision. It also annoyed me that there was no quick way to jump back to current conditions from a few days in the future. Having to swipe back five days can get old quick. The intuitive thing to do would have been to make tapping on the calendar page in the corner a button to jump back to today. Not to mention having two seperate screens for current conditions and then again for today’s high and low is silly. If the current and overall today report had been combined on a single screen, the interface would work a lot better.

Sounds Enticing, Right?

There’s a catch to Outside: you have to subscribe. To notifications that is. You could use it for weather conditions at no extra charge, but you only get 30 days worth of notifications. If you wanna up that, it’s $0.99 for 90 days worth. So if you figure in the $2.99 the app itself costs, and then 4 subscriptions, that’s about $6.00 for the first year of use. That’s not a whole lot by any means, but it might put some folks off. As a weather forecast app, it’s pretty, but average. I use WeatherCal on my Mac, and that syncs to the calendar on my iPhone, and that’s how I get my forecast. It’s quicker to scan while I’m checking appointments than to open a seperate app and flick through the days. However, if the idea of getting notifications intrigues you, I’d recommend checking Outside out, and if those first 30 days of notifications don’t win you over, then it’s not like it put much of a dent in your wallet. I think it would be better if they gave you 90 days in your initial purchase price, but oh well. Download it from the App Store.