Apple has bundled a weather app with every iPhone and iPod touch ever sold, so creating a paid third-party alternative is either extremely foolish or very brave. To succeed, you’d have to stand out and offer something so different that paying for it actually makes sense.

This is precisely what the creator of Partly Cloudy has done. Most weather apps offer a nice graphic of the current weather, along with basic information like temperature and other details. By contrast, Partly Cloudy is very spartan; there are no pretty pictures, just what looks like an unusual clock face.

But this interface packs a ton of information: by default, you can see the weather for your chosen location’s next twelve hours, but you can change that to either the next twenty-four, or the next seven days. The colored ring gives you an idea of the temperature at any given time, lines like spokes from the center denote wind strength, and blue blobs depict the amount of expected rain. You can also drag the hand along the clock face to get more detailed information at specific points in time, and doing so changes the numerical values at the top of the interface. As with other weather apps, you can set numerous locations, which you can check at any time and of course switch between Celsius and Fahrenheit.

The bottom line. It’s amazing how quickly you get used to how the information is displayed on Partly Cloudy, so much so in fact that switching back to Apple’s default app feels extremely limiting in comparison. Raureif has found an original way to display the weather, and it’s one worth seeing.