Crafting Dynamic Weather Widgets: An AI-Inspired Journey to Recreate Apple’s Experience
At this year’s Developer Day at AKQA Denmark, the perennial topic of weather took an innovative turn. Developers were challenged to harness AI to design movie-inspired weather widgets, leading to imaginative creations like a Ghostbuster-themed New York forecast or a Gladiator-esque Rome weather display. This engaging exercise, utilizing tools like Claude Code and Vercel v0, sparked an idea: to recreate Apple’s iconic weather widgets using a unified baseline web component.
This project aimed to demonstrate the power of component reusability and modern web development techniques. The core concept revolved around a single baseline weather widget web component that intelligently handled locales and units, ensuring users always saw relevant values (Celsius/Fahrenheit, miles/kilometers, etc.).
Data at the Core
Weather data was primarily sourced from WeatherAPI.com, known for its generous free tier, specifically using their forecast API. To enrich the experience with local country and city names, data from OpenStreetMap was integrated. A Cloudflare Worker, leveraging KV store for API keys, served to filter and merge this diverse data, streamlining the information flow.
A Suite of Smart Widgets
The endeavor resulted in a collection of 13 distinct weather widgets, each meticulously crafted to emulate the Apple aesthetic and functionality. Many of these widgets ingeniously leveraged previously developed CSS components, significantly reducing the coding effort required. For instance:
- Moon Phase: Easily implemented by adapting existing “Phases of the Moon in CSS” components.
- Precipitation & Temperature: Utilized custom CSS-only charts for clear visual representation.
- Pressure: Integrated “CSS Gauges” for an intuitive display.
- Sunphase & Wind: These more complex widgets involved dedicated, imported components, with Sunphase requiring intricate SVG-based calculations and Wind drawing inspiration from “Clocks and Watches in CSS” for its “nav-compass” component.
- Feels Like, Humidity, Visibility, UV, Forecast Days/Hours: These provided essential weather metrics, often with simple yet effective designs, like the UV index styled as a slider output.
The Responsiveness Revolution: Container Queries
A standout feature across these widgets is the intelligent use of container queries. Unlike traditional media queries that react to viewport width, container queries allow each widget to adapt its layout based on its own available space. This means a widget can gracefully transition from a compact display showing only essential data in a narrow column to an expanded view revealing detailed charts and graphs when more room is available. This self-contained responsiveness makes the widgets incredibly versatile and reusable across various layouts and screen sizes. The “Overview” widget, which combines several individual widgets, brilliantly showcases the dynamic morphing capabilities enabled by container queries.
A Comprehensive Weather Experience
This project demonstrates a comprehensive approach to building sophisticated web components. From initial AI-inspired ideation to the practical implementation of data integration, localized units, and advanced CSS techniques like container queries, the result is a robust and visually appealing set of weather widgets. The extensive collection of CodePen demos provides a valuable resource for anyone interested in exploring the intricacies of these creations.