Also, reminder that the places interface they were developing on the old site is awesome:
https://reg.bom.gov.au/places/
– you can navigate to an arrangement of weather info for a place and just bookmark that URL.
Old site was so much better new mess. Rain radar in new one is prime example how you should not build UI.
Doesn’t surprise me, the old website is a much better user experience for me.
The new one is noticeably slower, hides the info I want to see behind extra clicks/scrolling, made the radar view worse, and doesn’t improve the only thing I’d want to improve from the old site (making it easier to find less commonly used information such as river heights or past observations). In fact they made that part worse because now it bounces between the new design and remnants of the old one for anything bar the most commonly visited sections - even for basic stuff like a synoptic chart.
hides the info I want to see behind extra clicks/scrolling
That’s what gets me. It’s the very definition of bad UI design. You’re meant to reduce the number of steps for the user to achieve their goal or complete their task.
Although, the nice thing about the new site is that the BoM website finally got around to enabling HTTPS support, instead of having a redirect that supported HTTPS telling you that the actual website didn’t support HTTPS.
I’ll consider it modern when it supports HTTP/2 (which I think it does now) and IPv6.
I have no idea how you can build a brand new website on IPv4 in ${CURRENT_YEAR}.
The reg subdomain linked in the OP also supports HTTPS.
It does now, but it didn’t used to.
They changed the old site to also allow HTTPS when it was updated.
reg.bom.gov.au has existed for a few years at least and always had HTTPS as far as I can remember. The original HTTP site was just retired altogether from what I can tell.
Holy shit!
You can still use the old site, excellent, thanks.
Also, please use the new site every so often, BoM are requesting feedback about the UI. Let them know how you feel about dropdown content.
Dropdown content?
On the new site, the 7-day forecast has each day initially folded up, to see the data you need to click on the 'V’or ‘Expand all’.
The indentations on the old site make it easier to differentiate the days too.
TIL there’s a new updated site. The old site is also easy to scrape weather info for any automations, so apart from human resistance to change in UI it could also be a resistance to updating code.
