41–50 of 173 posts
Will Google support and maintain an actual maps application? Or will they merge google earth and google maps together in an even less capable tool purely for consumers to wow at? Castrating Google Earth with the webgl version and locking it into Chrome was bad enough. I wish this stops here.
By the way, for anyone who prefers Google Maps to load fast and show actual satellite/aerial imagery (rather than trying to render each tree as a weird crumpled blob) there's a flag you can set to get the old, fast 2D mode: https://maps.google.com/?force=canvas
"On flat maps, it’s impossible to represent land mass size on a relative scale." Um, no it's not. TechCrunch needs better editors. You just need to use a non-Mercator projection. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gall%E2%80%93Peters_projection
You can represent size or shape correctly, not both. Anyone who uses the Gall-Peters projection is a cop.
Edit: better Dymaxion link https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dymaxion_map It's made of triangles that you can rearrange, which isn't really shown in the xkcd.
By the way, for anyone who prefers Google Maps to load fast and show actual satellite/aerial imagery (rather than trying to render each tree as a weird crumpled blob) there's a flag you can set to get the old, fast 2D mode: https://maps.google.com/?force=canvas
I'm actually quite annoyed that Google took away the visible option to disabled the 3D aerial view. It's such a resource hog, and my work's internet is often quite slow, and 3D has far more data to retrieve.
I wonder what the long term geopolitical consequences will be when we all stop looking at projected maps. That small peninsula to the west of Asia just got a little smaller. A certain island kingdom is now more clearly the size of Uganda. Maybe Google can also flip the globe "upside-down" for all users "below" the equator.
By the way, for anyone who prefers Google Maps to load fast and show actual satellite/aerial imagery (rather than trying to render each tree as a weird crumpled blob) there's a flag you can set to get the old, fast 2D mode: https://maps.google.com/?force=canvas
Thank you! I'm actually quite annoyed that Google took away the visible option to disabled the 3D aerial view. It's such a resource hog, and my work's internet is often quite slow, and 3D has far more data to retrieve.
I wonder what the long term geopolitical consequences will be when we all stop looking at projected maps. That small peninsula to the west of Asia just got a little smaller. A certain island kingdom is now more clearly the size of Uganda. Maybe Google can also flip the globe "upside-down" for all users "below" the equator.
Australian maps are shown with Oz in the middle, and the pacific / indian oceas each side, with South East Asia and Antarctia surrounding, exactly the same way US maps put the US in the center.
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That's still not an accurate map. 3D maps don't have projection issues, they can have near perfect representation of the world.
The eyes see a 2-dimensional picture. Computer displays produce a 2-dimensional picture. There is no such thing as a “3D map” on a standard computer display. Only an orthographic (or maybe perspective) projection which animates in response to user input. In general an orthographic projection is a poor choice. The thing going for it is that it is easy to understand by analogy to a physical globe, and human spatial und…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
on my work computer, which is tunneled through san francisco, so i show as in USA, i can see the 3D map. checking maps on mobile which is on Canadian ISP, in chrome and the google maps android app, i can only see the "flat" map.
Thanks. I thought it was a "browser thing". My desktop firefox shows flat maps only. -ss