![]() ![]() The fourth icon at the screen's lower left shows the traditional spiral symbol for a hurricane. It is said to accurately depict the night sky, and, indeed, I was able to make out constellations such as Orion, Aquila, and Sagittarius. By pinching the globe, you can shrink it, and more of the stars will be visible. The globe, displayed against a starry background, takes up the majority of the screen. (While most of the globe has low to moderate wind speeds as I write this, red areas depict storm systems near the Philippines, the Aleutian Islands, and Iceland.) Taken together, these maps present a snapshot of a variety of weather conditions throughout the world. For instance, with winds, blue areas have low winds, while red denotes high winds. Tapping on any of these mini-globe icons superimposes its data on the main globe, along with a legend for the color-coding. Four depict current conditions (cloud cover, wind speed, temperature, and humidity), while the other five show forecast conditions for the next 24 hours: mean, maximum, and minimum temperature, plus wind and humidity. Tapping it brings up a carousel-style strip of nine globe icons displayed across the bottom of the screen. In testing, I found the third icon, which depicts the Earth, the most intriguing. (Opens in a new window) Read Our Cozmic Zoom (for iPad) Review From the Settings list you can also open a Help section, which gives you a basic overview of the app and its functions. Touching the Settings icon reveals a list of items you can change, including such things as temperature scale, wind speed (from MPH to km/h, m/s, or knots), notifications for tropical cyclones, and display of clouds at night. The first icon shows crosshairs, and it rotates the globe to your current location when you tap it. This is one of six icons in the screen's lower left corner, which are normally hidden but become visible when you tap the screen. By default, the other five are Cupertino, New York City, London, Shanghai, and Sydney, but you can remove and add cities from the Settings list, accessible through the familiar gear icon. Tapping on your location, in the screen's lower left corner, calls up a list of six cities with their current weather. You can enlarge the date and time by tapping on it tapping again returns it to its original size. There is no option in the settings to change to a 24-hour clock, like Cosmic-Watch ($4.99 at ) (Opens in a new window) uses to display local time, or to use the European convention with the day preceding the month. It uses a 12-hour scheme with AM and PM, showing hours and minutes, and below the time is the day of the week and the date (month and day). The upper right corner of the screen shows the time in your current location or whatever city you set it for. Read our editorial mission (Opens in a new window) & see how we test (Opens in a new window). Since 1982, PCMag has tested and rated thousands of products to help you make better buying decisions. Tapping on the temperature-which is displayed in Fahrenheit, but can be switched to Celsius in the Settings menu-calls up a 10-day forecast table from the excellent Weather Underground, showing high and low temperatures, conditions, and chance of precipitation for each day. ![]() At the upper right corner of the screen is a capsule look at the weather, with an icon showing the current conditions (clear, partly cloudy, cloudy, rainy, or snowy), then the current temperature, and then the day's high and low. (In my testing, a check of the National Weather Service's latest cloud-cover map revealed the cloud cover shown on the globe to indeed be current.) You can stop the rotation simply by tapping the screen. When you open Living Earth, your view zooms in on a spinning globe, with the day side depicting cloud cover and the night portion showing some clouds and the lights of cities. I tested it on an iPad Air 2 running iOS 10.2. Living Earth runs on iPads or iPhones, as well as the Apple Watch. These global views are Living Earth's most compelling feature, and provide a nice complement to the time and weather data that the app otherwise provides. In its meteorological role, it provides somewhat cursory 10-day forecasts for up to six cities, and also shows, superimposed on a globe, the current (or near-future) temperature, cloud cover, wind speeds, and humidity for the entire planet. Its clock function is similar to the Clock app included with iOS.
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