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I'm sure apple maps will get better, but seeing as they're not a search engine, I don't think they'll ever get quite as good at finding by location names.
To be honest, despite its flaws, it's going to be ok for most of the people, most of the time. Navigation is going to be a big boon. Using it I haven't noticed major differences personally. Some restaurants are in the wrong location, but on the flip side I like the yelp reviews. I'm sure they will improve on the areas that are flawed.
What 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…
It certainly will be better but I'm not holding my breath about Apple maps surpassing Google Maps any time soon. Google bought a Rasmussen brothers' company (what eventually became Google Maps) in 2004. That's eight years of product development, data collection, storage and refining -- all at Google's pace. Will Apple find some shortcut to compress this time in one-two year? Unlikely.
It's very easy to underestimate the amount of pure, repetitive effort required to build products of this sort and how hard it is to "disrupt" the industries with players like Google.
To be honest, despite its flaws, it's going to be ok for most of the people, most of the time. Navigation is going to be a big boon. Using it I haven't noticed major differences personally. Some restaurants are in the wrong location, but on the flip side I like the yelp reviews. I'm sure they will improve on the areas that are flawed.
For Apple's set of rich customers in the U.S., yeah, maybe driving and walking are good enough. But "most of the people" is a huge overstatement.
Apple made this decision just to dump Google and try to gain more control. Apple dind't want to use OpenStreetMap because its open source solution and Apple never uses open source solution. Yeah, its iOS and OS X is based on Linux (sort of) but they will never tell this to anyone. iOS 6 Maps sucks just like the App Store on the New iPad. Maybe it is just me but I found it very, very slow. It's better on iPhone
Unless you've got inside information we have no idea who dumped who, all we know is the contract expired and it wasn't renewed. Google might have applied financial pressure, Apple might have thrown their toys out of the pram. It's unknown.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"It was the perfect opportunity to leapfrog Google and help the open source community" The only time Apple helps open source is when they hire the most important people in really important projects, and then they graciously allow them to continue contributing. CUPS, LLVM, it's happened a couple times. They take good care of these guys, but I always feel like their contributions to the projects after Apple are being w…
First time I heard about CUPS! Apparently it's a kind of printing system. Thanks. http://www.cups.org/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CUPS
I'm clueless about mapping/geocoding/etc (it's amazing I make it to the grocery store and back) but I keep hearing that Apple needed to get this out there so that they could start getting data feeding back from the millions of iOS users, and thus (presumably rapidly) improving the quality of the maps. Is there any truth at all to that? I don't quite understand where they'd be getting that data back from - e.g. if I s…
I doubt that data is being collected to help users with "more accurate maps", but probably "more accurate advertising".
The "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 a…