sounix / ocula

The free and open-source progressive weather app

Ocula

The free and open-source progressive weather app

• About
• Features
• Philosophy
• Donating
• Credits

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
• 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 (see self-hosting).

Donating

Please consider donating to the ongoing development of this project by visiting my Patreon page.

Credits

• Weather forecast provided by Open eatherMap.
• Precipitation map tiles provided by RainViewer.
• Maps and geocoding services provided by MapBox.
• Logo designed by Ethan Roxburgh.
• Icons provided by Remix Icons.