My thanks to Hello Weather for sponsoring last week at DF. Regular readers know that I am an inveterate aficionado of weather apps. I’m not really much of a meteorology nerd, but I’m a pedestrian in a city with widely varying seasons. But even more so, I find weather apps to be a true playground for UI design and the presentation of quantitative information. Different weather apps take very different approaches, and I find the differences fascinating.

I first recommended Hello Weather back in 2021, and it’s been in my regular rotation of weather apps ever since. Back at the beginning of summer when they booked the sponsorship for this week, I started using the new version 4.0 (now up to 4.1.4) as my daily driver. I love it. It even has one of my favorite features for hot humid summers — a preference to set “feels like” as the primary temperature display (including in places like widgets). Hello Weather remains, as ever, attractive and useful in its design. And it offers everything you want in an iOS weather app: widgets for the home screen and Lock Screen, a Watch app, notification options (precipitation, severe storms, morning/evening forecast reports), and, wow, a veritable slew of forecast data providers to choose from.

Hello Weather’s privacy story is perfect: they collect zero user data, have no tracking or ads, and their privacy policy is written by humans for humans.

I highly recommend you download Hello Weather and start a 7-day free trial.

I firmly believe one could build a very nice business taking 10 percent of subscription revenue for a blogging/newsletter platform, if you could get as nice a roster of popular writers to build on the platform as Substack has. I do not think that’s a $1 billion business, though.

Simple single-page website with (a) reasons to leave Substack; (b) links to comprehensive step-by-step instructions for how to move to other platforms, such as Ghost, Buttondown, and Beehiiv; and (c) links to several popular publications that moved and are glad they did.

Google:

While we previously announced discontinuing support for all goo.gl URLs after August 25, 2025, we’ve adjusted our approach in order to preserve actively used links. We understand these links are embedded in countless documents, videos, posts and more, and we appreciate the input received.

Nine months ago, we redirected URLs that showed no activity in late 2024 to a message specifying that the link would be deactivated in August, and these are the only links targeted to be deactivated. If you get a message that states, “This link will no longer work in the near future”, the link won’t work after August 25 and we recommend transitioning to another URL shortener if you haven’t already.

All other goo.gl links will be preserved and will continue to function as normal. To check if your link will be retained, visit the link today. If your link redirects you without a message, it will continue to work.

Nice!

Only with Substack does anyone perceive creator branding as being subservient to the platform — something that ought to be seen merely as an interchangeable CMS.