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Apple delivers a new redesigned Maps for users in the United States

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171–180 of 476 posts

Re: Apple delivers a new redesigned Maps for users in the United States

#171
post #37

What I hate most about Apple Maps is that reports about incorrect data never seem to go anywhere. Apple Maps thinks that the road that leads to my house is a one-way street. It's not. But because of this error Apple Maps always wants to send me on a 5 minutes detour if I try to use it to navigate home. I've reported the problem twice but never got an answer or a correction. In fact all problems I've ever reported in…

What we need is a map that's organized like Wikipedia—anyone can immediately contribute to it.

Like Open Street Maps?

Re: Apple delivers a new redesigned Maps for users in the United States

#172

Shameless plug, but we just shipped our huge Gaia Topo update too. Gaia Topo focuses on the backcountry, and specifically downloading for offline use: https://blog.gaiagps.com/easy-to-read-tiny-to-download-the-a...

Absolutely love Gaia! Almost 10 years of my outdoor life are in that app!

With the current pricing and amount of users, is it a sustainable business?

Re: Apple delivers a new redesigned Maps for users in the United States

#173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Is it Apple Maps bad?" --Gavin Belson, Silicon Valley They had no place to go but up. That first version was absolutely embarrassing. I'm honestly surprised they were allowed to make it this far. To this day, I still do not use Apple Maps. As much as they try to get me to use it with all of the iOS embedding they've done, I still won't use it.

Why not? Because it started out bad.... 7 years ago?

I've tried it several times after various upgrades, but just never has won me over. There's multiple competing products. This particular one has always been behind in usability. There's just always been something that wasn't up to snuff, and I stop using it. I have better things to do than suffer with less usable software.

In the old days of Macromedia Freehand and Adobe Illustrator, each version would add features and updates that would make it slightly better than the other. I would use it until the other came out with their new version. It was a constant ping pong/leapfrog of competing products trying to win until Adobe ultimately won outright. In my testing, not once has Apple Maps leapfrogged to be the leading app.

Re: Apple delivers a new redesigned Maps for users in the United States

#176
post #44

In the midst of the world (rightly) turning on big tech's abuses, efforts like these make me optimistic about our industry on a whole and help me recover some of the enthusiasm that led me into tech in the first place. I love how this effort relies on & amplifies what were before relatively obscure specialties The mapping wars elevate cartographers, mapping specialists, GIS data nerds, mobile computing / compression…

What abuse? how is it right? It's the news industry that is leading and fuling attacks on tech companies for selfish financial reasons, and "big tech" is their term, it's a testament to their efficacy that people in tech drank that kool aid.

Re: Apple delivers a new redesigned Maps for users in the United States

#177
post #92
post #44

In the midst of the world (rightly) turning on big tech's abuses, efforts like these make me optimistic about our industry on a whole and help me recover some of the enthusiasm that led me into tech in the first place. I love how this effort relies on & amplifies what were before relatively obscure specialties The mapping wars elevate cartographers, mapping specialists, GIS data nerds, mobile computing / compression…

As much as I agree with your general sentiment, Apple Maps, like many of Apple's mobile apps, gets a boost from Apple's anti-competitive practices. It's utterly ridiculous that we can remove default apps from iOS, including Maps and Safari, but we can't set new default apps to replace them. If we ever get serious about increasing competition in the tech sector, an easy place to start is letting users set default brow…

One specific thing that bothers me is that Microsoft got in trouble for bundling IE with Windows, but apple doesn't get in trouble when they block all browser apps that don't use Safari under the hood. How is this different? I want Google and Mozilla (and anyone else) to be able to make iOS browser apps from scratch if they want. It wouldn't be an issue if you could sideload apps easily, but the app store is really the only legit way to get apps on your non-jailbroken iPhone.

Re: Apple delivers a new redesigned Maps for users in the United States

#178
post #44

In the midst of the world (rightly) turning on big tech's abuses, efforts like these make me optimistic about our industry on a whole and help me recover some of the enthusiasm that led me into tech in the first place. I love how this effort relies on & amplifies what were before relatively obscure specialties The mapping wars elevate cartographers, mapping specialists, GIS data nerds, mobile computing / compression…

....what are you talking about? This is just an update on yet another closed platform. If apple cared about elevating the discipline and righting the abuses of big tech with their mapping app they'd partner with OpenStreetMap and make the data public rather than continuing to silo all the data about you and everyone around you. Instead we're continuing the closed source data gathering land rush and trying to beat goo…

Why do you equate “elevating the discipline” with “give away the data?”.

Are you suggesting Google didnt elevate the discipline of search because their backend is closed?

Re: Apple delivers a new redesigned Maps for users in the United States

#180
post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are so many issues like this. People complain about TomTom maps never being updated in navigation systems because it's licensed, Apple Maps being crappy (or in this case, wrong), even Google Maps is often slow in updating (e.g. the tunnel in Maastricht took some time after it opened, which was known and announced years ahead) and very incomplete in terms of footpaths and trails. The USA is probably the worst ex…

Wow, OpenStreetMaps is worse which makes a bit of sense. Is there a good (step-by-step) tutorial on submitting data to OSM. I get the feeling if I can get the land grants people to submit their data it might make things a bit better.

https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Beginners%27_guide

It's pretty easy, you just make an account, pick an editor and start making outlines and tagging stuff

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