Earlier quoted context omitted.
Tagline is "The Apple iOS 6 Maps are amazing. Not."
Did you even read my entire statement?
I CANNOT ACCESS YOUR COMMENT
The Amazing iOS 6 Maps
11–20 of 384 posts
Re: The Amazing iOS 6 Maps
#12I hope this is meant as sarcasm. I cannot open the article from workplace, but I truly hope it's derision. EDIT - People are downvoting without reading it entirely. I have mentioned I CANNOT ACCESS THE ARTICLE. So the only truth available to me is the Post here.
Why comment on something you can't and haven't seen just to say what you hope it is?
Re: The Amazing iOS 6 Maps
#13What confuses me about Apple's choice of maps here is why they didn't go with OpenStreetMap? It was the perfect opportunity to leapfrog Google and help the open source community at the same time, and they would have had more control over the data - as it is they are beholden to TomTom and other providers to try to get things fixed, or will have to try to merge future map updates with their own patches. As it is they…
Openstreetmap's doesnt address any of the OP's issues. Having built maps for the past 12 years, I know exactly what of each of those issues are about. The blurry images are underlying base layers that drew first and then probably the upper layer timed out when rendering the tile. The curves are caused by elevation measurements that are incorrect (measuring elevation from a satellite involves bouncing from the ground - when there are structures below, depending on the material, it may go through or bounce differently) or precision problems when generating the elevation grid (very common). The big white thing are clouds, when you buy highly expensive imagery you get them with louds (say 30% cloud blockage) and you need to comnine several images taken a different times, color correct them, and stitch them back to remove it (try to do this for one city and then think about doing it for the entire world). The routes that don't match the pins is weird, but it could be that the snapping point for the routing engine snapped to the wrong street edge (it seems very far though) or that the geocoder and the routing engine use different geocoders (that would be bad). Creating a good mapping product is difficult, but Apple will have something much better in one year.
Re: The Amazing iOS 6 Maps
#14I hope this is meant as sarcasm. I cannot open the article from workplace, but I truly hope it's derision. EDIT - People are downvoting without reading it entirely. I have mentioned I CANNOT ACCESS THE ARTICLE. So the only truth available to me is the Post here.
If you can't read the article, then why are you commenting on it?
Re: The Amazing iOS 6 Maps
#15What confuses me about Apple's choice of maps here is why they didn't go with OpenStreetMap? It was the perfect opportunity to leapfrog Google and help the open source community at the same time, and they would have had more control over the data - as it is they are beholden to TomTom and other providers to try to get things fixed, or will have to try to merge future map updates with their own patches. As it is they…
Open Streetmaps is a great project, but it doesn't include orthophotography. Even if they were using it, it wouldn't fix the errors with missing or blurry images, cloud cover, or rubber sheeting errors.
Of course they'd have to get the satellite data from elsewhere (though they couldn't do much worse than the stuff they have frankly), but the vector data and POIs would have been a good start, and probably more accurate and complete than what they have, at least in some countries. They would probably always have to buy satellite imagery.
I'd rather have seen more focus on getting the basics right, even if it meant they had to leave out (for example) satellite imagery in the first iteration. As it is they have broken satellite data, broken street mapping, and incomplete place names.
If they had chosen to back an open project like this they could have had a team of people worldwide fixing their maps for them, rather than trying to collate and correct thousands of bug reports from around the world and push them out in revisions. I wouldn't like to be on their mapping team over the next few months :)
Re: The Amazing iOS 6 Maps
#16What confuses me about Apple's choice of maps here is why they didn't go with OpenStreetMap? It was the perfect opportunity to leapfrog Google and help the open source community at the same time, and they would have had more control over the data - as it is they are beholden to TomTom and other providers to try to get things fixed, or will have to try to merge future map updates with their own patches. As it is they…
Openstreetmap's doesnt address any of the OP's issues. Having built maps for the past 12 years, I know exactly what of each of those issues are about. The blurry images are underlying base layers that drew first and then probably the upper layer timed out when rendering the tile. The curves are caused by elevation measurements that are incorrect (measuring elevation from a satellite involves bouncing from the ground…
The link is to a rolling blog of images, so you might not be looking at the same images I am. Here is an example of one:
http://theamazingios6maps.tumblr.com/post/31923886066/are-yo...
There are a lot of problems with road map and point data (at least in the UK) which are nothing to do with the points you've raised above, though those are fair criticisms too - however the satellite data is the least of their worries, I'm sure they could buy in a better cleaned up set of satelite tiles if they're willing to spend enough money, and people expect some problems with that, but basic search and mapping is not as complete as it should be.
Re: The Amazing iOS 6 Maps
#17I hope this is meant as sarcasm. I cannot open the article from workplace, but I truly hope it's derision. EDIT - People are downvoting without reading it entirely. I have mentioned I CANNOT ACCESS THE ARTICLE. So the only truth available to me is the Post here.
How is it that you can browse and comment on HN but not open an article?
Re: The Amazing iOS 6 Maps
#18I hope this is meant as sarcasm. I cannot open the article from workplace, but I truly hope it's derision. EDIT - People are downvoting without reading it entirely. I have mentioned I CANNOT ACCESS THE ARTICLE. So the only truth available to me is the Post here.
How is it that you can browse and comment on HN but not open an article?
Re: The Amazing iOS 6 Maps
#19The "roller coaster" effects in the 3-d view are my favorite. They've got some smoothing algorithm going, or it wouldn't curve the way it does, but the elevation data must not have a high enough resolution. Google has made this sort of thing look so easy for so long, but it's clearly very hard to get this stuff right.
So, I guess it's not that surprising that apple messed up something incredibly hard in their first attempt. I'm curious as to whether these issues are as widespread as they seem, or if they're more edge cases made to appear common by the internet. But the curiosity isn't enough to drive me to upgrade. I'm totally putting off that until I figure out a decent alternative app.
Re: The Amazing iOS 6 Maps
#20I really hope that people are using the 'Report Problem' feature in the app every time they post a screenshot here. Because that is one of the biggest things everyone can do that will help the map data to improve.