New Year's message + Nullschool app is here

Hi there. This is Cameron, creator of earth.nullschool.net.

Happy New Year! 🎉

I just wanted to highlight a few things that made 2025 a busy year.

I created a company, Nullschool Technologies, to dedicate myself full time to the operation and development of earth.nullschool.net. There is only one employee: me! I don't expect that to change anytime soon. This is to keep things small, fast, and flexible, but with some formality around day-to-day operations. My goal remains unchanged: to make Earth's weather and climate visible to everyone.

Speaking of which, I built and shipped the official Nullschool mobile app! Many of you have asked for this over the years, but I didn't have time to work on it until recently. It was a huge task, and it is finally available for both iOS and Android.

The app includes all the functionality of earth.nullschool.net in a nicer, more convenient package. Unlike a mobile browser, the app fills the entire screen and works well in both portrait and landscape modes.

The app also provides an opportunity to support my work as an indie developer. By purchasing an optional subscription, you fund new feature development and help keep the lights on for all users. You also gain access to a few nice extras, like snapshot sharing and a Favorites gallery to save and curate notable weather events. I would be grateful for any support you can provide.

For readers interested in the tech: the app is written in Typescript and React Native using a webview for the globe visualization. This approach makes it possible to build both the website and app from the same codebase with only some features, like the Favorites gallery, implemented within the app itself.

This is just the first version! You can expect many improvements to come throughout 2026.

The website (and app) are now fully translated into 11 different languages, with Spanish, Hindi, and Traditional Chinese newly available. Being the sole developer, I relied heavily on machine translation to do this work. If you notice any oddities, please let me know.

Finally, a bit of trivia. Why "Nullschool"? The name is… well… odd.

Long ago, I wanted a domain for hosting personal email and a blog of unique content, as was the fashion back then. So unique, in fact, that it could not be categorized as either "old school" or "new school". It would be "no school". (Eh, whatever, I was young.)

I pitched this idea to a group of programmer friends while driving down I-5 through Seattle. One suggested changing "no" to "null" because it eliminated the possibility of categorization entirely (even more unique, right?!). And since .com, .org, and .net TLDs were the only realistic options at the time, we all agreed "nullschool.net" sounded best. And that's how the name was born. I registered it shortly after.

And did nothing with it. For years.

Fast-forward to 2013. The new weather visualizer I built as a way to learn JavaScript and HTML/CSS needed to be hosted somewhere. Not giving it much thought, I dusted off the only domain I owned and published the project at earth.nullschool.net, entirely for convenience. Now it has a life of its own. And that, as they say, is that.

Thanks for being a member of the e.n.n community. As always, please let me know what you think and any new features you'd like to see. Even though I can’t reply to everything, I read all the feedback.

🌍🌎🌏