rud.is

Apple is in the final stages of shuttering the DarkSky service/API. They’ve replaced it with WeatherKit, which has both an xOS framework version as well as a REST API. To use either, you need to be a member of the Apple Developer Program (ADP) — $99.00/USD per-year — and calls to the service via either method are free up to 500K/month. After that, Apple has pricing tears.

As a result of the forced-ADP membership fee, I’m not sure how many folks are going to invest in building anything but freemium native or web apps. DarkSky had a generous free tier that only required an API key.

Since I had a {darksky} R package, I recently made a similar {weatherkit} package —https://rud.is/b/2022/07/07/introducing-weatherkit-the-eventual-replacement-r-package-for-darksky/ — complete with a CLI demo program.

Lots of R folks will disagree with the following, but R is a terrible language for CLI tools if you’re not already invested in the R ecosystem. CRAN makes it a pain to modify the user’s local system, and most R things have a ton of dependencies. So, while I generally code R-first, I do not code R-only, especially for CLI tools.

I like Rust more than Golang, and am also getting used to it over C/C++, so I threw together a Rust-based WeatherKit CLI tool shortly after the R one — https://github.com/hrbrmstr/weatherkit-rust. There’s documentation for how to cross all the t’s and dot all the i’s required to get authentication to work.

The GH releases have a signed macOS universal binary and I’m working on decomposing Starship’s wicked cool Rust release builder that uses the equally cool Google release-please to deal up binaries for virtually every platform.

I may make the Rust version a full WeatherKit API library, but I don’t know if I’m going to invest time into something that may just get shoved aside due to the hate I’m expecting to see pointed in Apple’s direction.