I just got done on the first stages of a maps instant answer for Jive Search using Mapbox and think it's coming along very well. Still have a lot to do in terms of adding directions and triggering the answer with the name of a city, etc but am quite happy with being able to switch from a map view to satellite view easily. Didn't take long to get up and running either. https://github.com/jivesearch/jivesearch
Farewell, Google Maps
91–100 of 545 posts
Re: Farewell, Google Maps
#92Google Maps strength is largely due in part to their surveying of roads with those funky looking vehicles I think most of us have seen. If one were to develop an app that could use anyone's GPS to do the same as what Google is paying money for... it could pose a real threat to them. A "crowdsourced" map of sorts..
Re: Farewell, Google Maps
#93I'm kind of unclear on what value they add above just using Google Maps to find a pharmacy? If all they do is repackage Google's data then I don't see Google as being particularly evil in this case, why should they give "the competition" a free ride? I have to guess they do add something (inventory data maybe?) to make it worthy of going to their website though.
From the screenshot, it looks like they offer inventory/pricing for the drug you care about.
Re: Farewell, Google Maps
#94I'm just finishing spinning up OpenStreetMap servers in EC2 as one of the last stages of our testing, and they look great. We almost went with Mapbox, which is probably a pretty good alternative. But as part of that move I decided to try OSM tiles and I had them up and running in an afternoon via a docker image, created an Ansible role for deploying virtual machines that evening, and had tiles for our region built th…
I totally recommend hosting your own tile-server using open street map if you have the resources . Creating your own tile-server is not as difficult as it may sound however it is really resource intensive, especially if you want to cover large areas. For a single EU country it shouldn't be that resource intensive. I have set it up on a Centos 7 server using more or less the instructions from here https://switch2osm.o…
Tile generation wasn't THAT bad. We only cover Colorado and Wyoming, and generating the tiles for those at the zoom levels 5-18 takes around 7 hours to pre-render (using "render_list_geo.pl"). The end result is around 25GB of rendered meta-tiles.
Much better than the NAIP aerial imagery, which takes around 3TB for the source data, 280GB for the resulting tiles, and around a full day to generate.
Re: Farewell, Google Maps
#95For the client library, it's interesting that they are bullish on leaflet rather than mapbox-gl-js. After playing with their respective demos, I found that the latter seems much smoother and prettier.
Re: Farewell, Google Maps
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
I totally recommend hosting your own tile-server using open street map if you have the resources . Creating your own tile-server is not as difficult as it may sound however it is really resource intensive, especially if you want to cover large areas. For a single EU country it shouldn't be that resource intensive. I have set it up on a Centos 7 server using more or less the instructions from here https://switch2osm.o…
Tile generation wasn't THAT bad. We only cover Colorado and Wyoming, and generating the tiles for those at the zoom levels 5-18 takes around 7 hours to pre-render (using "render_list_geo.pl"). The end result is around 25GB of rendered meta-tiles. Much better than the NAIP aerial imagery, which takes around 3TB for the source data, 280GB for the resulting tiles, and around a full day to generate.
Oh, and we are using the mapbox.js viewer rather than leaflet.
Re: Farewell, Google Maps
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
>In the case of maps, there weren't many great alternatives for a long time, due to Google sucking all the oxygen/profit potential out of the field with their excellent free offerings. ianal and all that, but isn't somewhere antitrust- or monopoly- adjacent? I know if walmart moved into a new city and started giving away hardware for free, then waited until all the local hardware stores had been shut down for 10 mont…
IANAL either, but yeah, the practice you're describing, using revenues from other parts of a business to subsidize the areas it wants to compete hard in until the competitors are dead, is typically known as "predatory pricing", which is illegal. IIRC, Standard Oil was a big user of that playbook. I don't know if this qualifies, and I don't know how much appetite there is for prosecuting Google for offering useful thi…
You never ever need to explain that you are not a lawyer on an internet post. you can outright claim you are a lawyer without any worries.
Cooking meth if you have a valid driver's license is actually legal, I am a lawyer this is legal advice
Re: Farewell, Google Maps
#98You could always use Leaflet or even d3.geo (or cesium or whatever) and just buy whatever tiles and data you need from the many providers who offer them. You would only need to buy for the areas you service and could buy new tiles annually or when you expand into new areas, just like you do with your car's GPS. You can buy rasters and vector data from so many providers, and actually get a lot higher quality data than Google in some cases (for some areas). This also affords you complete control over the map style, although some providers like Mapbox allow you a lot of control over look and feel via their StyleJSON stuff.
Also if it really is such a big part of your product, I don't really think $80 per day (for 15k unique users) as an operational cost is all that much honestly. And if you have a single page app, Google only charges for the first load anyways. They may have greatly increased the prices, but it does reflect the value they are providing and the tone taken in the article comes off as freeloading and ignorant of the effort level and value of providing such a service.
People also need to note that Google's javascript framework and embeddable maps is a different product than their maps.google.com, which seems to be higher quality both in the data and the rendering/features. The one they offer to embed on your site appears to be a much older version (for instance it doesn't support smooth zooming or 512x512 tiles). There are also TOS restrictions with what you can do with their javascript framework and widgets/API's, for instance you generally can't use other data providers or features from other mapping/GIS services on the same page.
Re: Farewell, Google Maps
#99Having used/managed/dealt Google Maps enterprise product, I can say, it alone has made me _hate_ and not trust Google. These price hikes are laughable...
Support forums/forms are buried deep and inaccessible via Google search (or were), and for technical support you're required to use some obscure login to contact someone. People may or may not reply to you in at timely manner, and sales reps don't give a shit about you the second you sign the paper.
Problems with their APIs or errors are impossible to get priority for... so you basically pony up many thousands of dollars and you get a product you have to support yourself. Not to mention back in the day the Google Maps JS had a memory leak (we had to write our own pinning layer).
... I will note, I've noticed Google Cloud seems to be better managed with actual semblance of support but it's the only one I've had a good experience with.
I recommend Google's services to no one because the support is so abysmal and now the price is too (at least for maps).
Re: Farewell, Google Maps
#100We switched from Google Maps to OpenMapTiles for the same reason. Running OpenMapTiles via Docker was pretty easy. We bought a license for the Tiles (Europe) and it was a one time fee only.
Interesting, you had to purchase a license for the tiles? I thought that OpenMapTiles were "open".