I clicked on the link expecting to find an article about hashmaps.
Should this be a map or 500 maps?
101–110 of 115 posts
Re: Should this be a map or 500 maps?
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
Huh? Google Maps is a map. If you don't use it for directions, then that's entirely what it is. Sure there are a few icons for sponsored businesses, but that's all. They're easy to ignore. The way you can pan and zoom, it's 1000x more useful than any of the road atlases I used to have to keep in my car. Looking up an address is instant rather than taking a couple of minutes on a paper atlas, and it's simple to pan an…
> Paper maps you can draw on, but erasing is hard/impossible I am amused when movies show military situations where commanders draw on huge and otherwise pristine rollout maps. Are they going to be discarded after this one engagement? If not, shouldn't there be scribbles from prior uses?
The best part is when you realize the movie production did 20 takes of that scene.
And so actually did discard 20 huge, otherwise pristine props, and had another 30 waiting because they didn't know how many takes would be needed.
Re: Should this be a map or 500 maps?
#103I hate overly designed news articles. I want to read the words and maybe see a couple of relevant pictures, thanks. Similarly I suspect most of these different individual maps are just bad. Whimsy and idiosyncrasy are all very well in theory, but in practice they're mostly just annoying.
Well, you've got your wish. Every damned website now looks the same. Whatever creativity the early internet promised has now been snuffed out to appease the user-metrics gods.
The early (graphical) Internet was black text on grey background with blue links and no images.
Myspace and Geocieties were already a couple of generation on from that, and ... frankly kind of a mess.
For the most part, I vastly prefer the Reader View rendering of websites over whatever's native. Design gets in the way of many things, including robustness and resilience over time (what happens when all those dependencies and embedded resources go away and/or are replace by pr0n, crypto miners, phishing, and/or surveillance payloads?), and simple legibility.
It's the exceedingly rare instance where "interactive" pages provide any additional information or capabilities, and virtually all of those are specialised one-offs. I'm thinking of several of the xkcd specials, or the work of Bret Victor or Nicky Case. I'm sorely hard pressed to think of any others. Mainstream pubs (notably the NY Times) are far worse for their efforts in this space.
Re: Should this be a map or 500 maps?
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
Huh? Google Maps is a map. If you don't use it for directions, then that's entirely what it is. Sure there are a few icons for sponsored businesses, but that's all. They're easy to ignore. The way you can pan and zoom, it's 1000x more useful than any of the road atlases I used to have to keep in my car. Looking up an address is instant rather than taking a couple of minutes on a paper atlas, and it's simple to pan an…
> The way you can pan and zoom, it's 1000x more useful than any of the road atlases I used to have to keep in my car. Except when it cleverly hides the street names, PoIs and other important labels, as you zoom in. The way Google Maps does it is so absurd that it feels it's done on purpose. A road atlas is a high-density map. Not the most convenient in paper form, and ripe for digitization, but not in the way Google…
> Except when it cleverly hides the street names
It's usually fine. Sure sometimes I wish it showed more, but that's just a matter of degree. Again, still 1000x more useful than a paper atlas. If it doesn't show the street name, it does when I zoom out or in or pan a little.
> You can't just put markers (multiple) in the middle of a search or normal scrolling, for example.
During normal scrolling? Of course you can. Just click on any building, and tap "save" in the panel that appears. I just checked on desktop, and you can even do it in the middle of a search -- the panel that appears is in addition to your existing search panel. Do it as many times as you want.
> Erasing from paper maps is easy - buy laminated ones and use dry-erase markers
I've never seen a laminated road atlas, and back in the day I worked a job that required driving for hours a day to addresses I'd never been before so I was familiar with all the atlases sold at the gas station and the bookstore. You're talking about the metropolitan atlases that are 100+ pages? I can't even imagine how thick and heavy they'd be if each page was laminated. Maybe they exist.
Re: Should this be a map or 500 maps?
#105I hate overly designed news articles. I want to read the words and maybe see a couple of relevant pictures, thanks. Similarly I suspect most of these different individual maps are just bad. Whimsy and idiosyncrasy are all very well in theory, but in practice they're mostly just annoying.
Well, you've got your wish. Every damned website now looks the same. Whatever creativity the early internet promised has now been snuffed out to appease the user-metrics gods.
The most creative parts of the early internet were on Usenet, I found. Posts all looked the same - better yet, they looked the way I styled them - but the look wasn't what was important.
Re: Should this be a map or 500 maps?
#106I hate overly designed news articles. I want to read the words and maybe see a couple of relevant pictures, thanks. Similarly I suspect most of these different individual maps are just bad. Whimsy and idiosyncrasy are all very well in theory, but in practice they're mostly just annoying.
Well, you've got your wish. Every damned website now looks the same. Whatever creativity the early internet promised has now been snuffed out to appease the user-metrics gods.
Hypothesis:
1. A more creative website by definition will take more attention to engage with than a less creative website.
2. Many users just "want the info" with minimal attention spend.
Hence the sites that take less attention to deliver the info will win - the less creative ones...
Maybe?!?
Re: Should this be a map or 500 maps?
#107I hate overly designed news articles. I want to read the words and maybe see a couple of relevant pictures, thanks. Similarly I suspect most of these different individual maps are just bad. Whimsy and idiosyncrasy are all very well in theory, but in practice they're mostly just annoying.
Well, you've got your wish. Every damned website now looks the same. Whatever creativity the early internet promised has now been snuffed out to appease the user-metrics gods.
It would be so much better if every website actually looked the same. Imagine the world if didn’t waste millions of human hours reinventing a date picker.
Re: Should this be a map or 500 maps?
#108hey this is elan, author of this piece. thanks for sharing and for the discussion for what it’s worth i do agree with the one or two comments here that say that the line “modularity is inversely correlated with expressiveness” is a bit reductive. i did have a long section of caveats but removed them because i felt like they confused the matter more. ironically i’m butting up against the expressive limits of the engli…
A thoughtful and interesting rumination! The bit about modularity and expressiveness is spot on. I guess the king was too cheap to hire land surveyors!
Re: Should this be a map or 500 maps?
#109Interestingly, I have the "opposite" problem. I have many maps that I wish were "one". I have 7+ mapping apps that I use regularly. Usually I am using several at once and having to swap back and forth to figure out the information I need. I really wish we had an interoperability protocol that allowed me to combine the data sets locked in each app. I would love to use only one map. I think there is a strong argument t…
> I really wish we had an interoperability protocol that allowed me to combine the data sets locked in each app
There already are some established ones, e.g., https://www.ogc.org/standard/wfs/
It's widely used in the GIS field, but unfortunately not adopted by the most popular consumer apps.
Re: Should this be a map or 500 maps?
#110I clicked on the link expecting to find an article about hashmaps.
Same, I thought it was discussing a design change from a single dictionary to a list of dictionaries