What shits me is they cut their meteorology budgets to pay for it

Probably an unpopular opinion, but I don't actually mind it. There's now a bunch of layers that are selectable on the radar page itself, which were either nonexistent or hard to find on the old site. There's an easy to understand hourly forecast, instead of the text only one (which is still there), and I had no problem finding the 7 day forecast. Also there's finally HTTPS by default!

Of course if you don't like it, this still seems to work for the old website: https://reg.bom.gov.au/

Yeah, I liked having a bookmark of the nearest radar - I could immediately bring it up with one click and see what's happening. The new system with the pannable map, you just have a view of the whole country, and must zoom into where you actually are to see what's happening.

The weather predictions layout is.. fine, but the old one definitely felt more like you had all the info you needed right there where this one you have to click 7-Day Forecast and then expand Tomorrow to see more detail.

Tried to submit feedback telling them that their feedback button covers the rain radar map controls on iPhone, only to have recaptcha prevent me from submitting the feedback, even after successfully completing it.

So I guess that sums up my thoughts so far. Do they seriously not have anyone test the site on a phone before they push it?

:shrug: I'll get used to it.

https://www.thebelltowertimes.com/the-bureau-of-meteorology-reveal-new-website-is-payback-for-public-still-calling-them-bom/

I don't hate it, and the previous one was certainly pretty dated.

Weatherzone hasn't been screwed up yet and has the 7 day forecast on the main page.

I personally like it. I wish it were a little more compact, but it seems to be nearly feature parable with the old one and looks a little more up to date. This seems to be a step up in accessibility, both in terms of screen reader compatibility and behaving more in line with what an average user would expect. They've apparently even gone the extra mile to ensure existing bookmarks keep working.

Having been behind a couple of these modernization efforts, no one ever likes them. People complain every time but the user testing doesn't lie. Unfortunately redesigns are necessary as technology and user expectations change and considering the fact that the old website didn't play well on mobile and was well over 10 years old (15 if you're counting from the last major redesign) I'd say this one was pretty due. The fact this redesign even kept nearly every feature and option (as far as I can tell), rolled out fairly smoothly, and hasn't gone too overboard with minimalism/lack of character, I'm willing to call the redesign good.

Sigh, time to rewrite my scraper so I can have just the facts in my top panel again. Last one got like 5 years I think, hopefully they're not going to up the pace...

My first impression is not liking it. But I haven't dug into it much. I did like the old one. The design of Hong Kong's is more to my taste. My criticism is purely visual at this point.

And still doesn't support TLS / HTTPS...

i.e. the make it look attractive to special needs kids school of design

eww, grow up

I love it.

I don't get why they font is so massive everywhere. Reminds me of every boomer with a Samsung in a flip case and their font size set to 800% and full brightness.

Also if you search for suburb name it gives you a list of matches including post code and state... but if you add postcode or state in the search box to try and reduce the number of results for common names, it returns no results?? (i.e. "Inala" works, "Inala, Queensland" does not)

Meanwhile the BOM app is far less accurate than Apple weather; often laughably so. They should focus their efforts on improving their data and modeling instead of superficial shit.