Shake your umbrella in my direction if you remember a Linux app called ‘Stormcloud’.
Stormcloud was a desktop weather app for Linux with some serious visual appeal for the period.
And between 2012 and 2013 Stormcloud enjoyed major success on the Ubuntu desktop.
Most unique about Stormcloud is the fact it wasn’t free: it cost a modest $2.991, yet managed to top the Ubuntu Software Centre sales chart for six months running.
As a weather app, Stormcloud didn’t set out to reinvent the wheel — i.e., no OpenGL-powered weather effects blown across the screen when it was windy, sunbeams dancing over the desktop UI during bright spells, or scattered clouds occluding apps during clement periods.
No, it did what it did well: show current conditions, a concise lookahead at the next few days’ forecast, a competent crop of customisation features, and a lick of desktop integration with the Unity desktop launcher.
Yet it seems popularity only gets you so far.
Despite being one of the best selling apps on Ubuntu, Stormcloud ended up vanishing faster than the smell after it rains.
So what happened?
A Typhoon Sweeps In
Stormcloud saw its brightness moments between its launcher in October 2012 and its sales success on the Ubuntu Software Center during 2013.
But by 2014 Stormcloud was fighting a storm on several fronts: dwindling sales, platform and app approval hurdles, and—far more deadly—Yahoo! Weather API changes scurrying the the app’s ability to do its core task, namely display weather
While the app sold well compared to other paid Linux software of the day, the Ubuntu sales figures didn’t lead to a life of luxury for Stormcloud’s chief developer, Jono Cooper (aka Consindo) – a New Zealand high-school student at the time.
Netting a couple of hundred dollars from the app was welcomed reward for a side project but not enough to sustain development in the longer term.
Other priorities—and apps—took hold in Jono’s life. He time was increasingly better spent working on his cross-platform, cloud-syncing note taking app Nitro Tasks given its scope and burgeoning popularity.
Stormcloud was left in the wind.
But that’s not where the story ends.
A fork forecast
Keen to not see a good app die, Archisman Panigrahi forked the source code to Stormcloud—despite being a paid app Stormcloud was always open-source—into a free version renamed ‘Typhoon‘.
For a short while it was all sun and smiles until earlier location service and forecast API snags nixed Typhoon as well.
A New Dawn?
That brings me to the point of this post: great apps don’t have to die.
Anyone could step up to fork Stormcloud (or Typhoon) again, and give the app a third lease of life on Linux.
Sure, we have the GNOME desktop weather app, and, sure, it’s okay. But I don’t really want to run a fully-fledged app simply to see weather forecast delivered in a vaguely pleasing way.
This post is more than just a backwards glance at a one-time well-known app: it’s a polite PSA too.
If anyone out there is familiar enough with location detection and forecasting APIs (e.g., Forecast.io, OpenWeather Map) and has a bit of basic Python or JavaScript knowledge, why not spend a weekend patching this up to cast a little sunlight into a few lives?
Maybe make it a Snap app so that it can run on any Linux distro?
Links for more info:
- https://github.com/consindo/stormcloud/
- https://github.com/apandada1/typhoon
- https://developer.forecast.io/
- https://openweathermap.org/
- https://developer.ubuntu.com/en/snappy/guides/
- This was the lowest price an app could sell for on Ubuntu Software Centre. As a result, the developer also sold unlock codes for $1.99 via Paypal ↩︎