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The Amazing iOS 6 Maps

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Re: The Amazing iOS 6 Maps

#121

Post by hcarvalhoalves »

untog wrote: post #57
roadnottaken wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also wonder how common these problems are. I live in San Diego and everything looks pretty-good to me. It renders my house in 3D and the turn-by-turn navigation worked great. There are obviously problems in some places, but so-far-so-good here.

I'm not surprised that results in California are great. This seems like a great example of why having the majority of your testers in one geographical location is not always a good thing.

I live in São Paulo, Brazil. The maps work well here. I simulated a trip to another city like I did with Google Maps a few months ago and the navigation is just as good.

Re: The Amazing iOS 6 Maps

#122

Post by MatthewPhillips »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #115
SoftwareMaven wrote: post #62

I look at this and can't believe Apple wanted to ship with this. And I mean that literally, not incredulously. I believe Apple wants to be in carol of its mapping future, but this product isn't ready yet, and I don't think Apple is so delusional to not be able to see that. So that makes me wonder what happened in contract negotiations with Google to force it out. Did Google flat-out say "No"? Seems unlikely. Was it j…

You are probably correct. However if you look at Google's moves in the maps API with respect to charging money the simplest explanation is that Apple and Google could not come to terms on the price for access and so Apple went with 'plan B'. Given the pain Apple is causing Google in its patent assault I don't doubt for a minute that the senior management at Google would have any regrets about 'losing' the Apple map b…

Apple doesn't have a history of dominating any free-to-use services so I'm doubtful that they'll invest beyond the "good enough" threshold. This feels like ReadingList to me.

Re: The Amazing iOS 6 Maps

#123

Post by icebraining »

batista wrote: post #55
AJ007 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Directions being ok most for most people, most of the time, is hardly acceptable. Google Maps had a tendency to drop pins for locations on the wrong spot. That meant I always had to confirm the location with street view, 100% of the time. Going to the wrong spot can be catastrophic in some instances (wrong or non existent hospital.) In others it can be really bad (missing a critical meeting, walking in during a weddi…

> I'll be moving to Android. Google's Android? As in Google, the inventor of the "perpetual beta"?

But they don't usually revert in quality.

Re: The Amazing iOS 6 Maps

#124

Post by uxp »

jpdoctor wrote: post #92
AJ007 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Directions being ok most for most people, most of the time, is hardly acceptable. Google Maps had a tendency to drop pins for locations on the wrong spot. That meant I always had to confirm the location with street view, 100% of the time. Going to the wrong spot can be catastrophic in some instances (wrong or non existent hospital.) In others it can be really bad (missing a critical meeting, walking in during a weddi…

> wrong or non existent hospital. FWIW: I can see that turning into a lawsuit.

Google's Maps TOS states[1]:

4. Content in the Products. (a) Map data, traffic, directions, and related Content are provided for planning purposes only. You may find that weather conditions, construction projects, closures, or other events may cause road conditions or directions to differ from the map results. You should exercise judgment in your use of this Content.

And Apple's iOS6 License agreement states[2]:

5. Services and Third Party Materials. (e) Neither Apple nor any of its content providers guarantees the availability, accuracy, completeness, reliability, or timeliness of stock information, location data or any other data displayed by any Services. [...] Location data provided by any Services, including the Apple Maps service, is provided for basic navigational and/or planning purposes only and is not intended to be relied upon in situations where precise location information is needed or where erroneous, inaccurate, time-delayed or incomplete location data may lead to death, personal injury, property or environmental damage. You agree that, the results you receive from the Maps service may vary from actual road or terrain conditions due to factors that can affect the accuracy of the Maps data, such as, but not limited to, weather, road and traffic conditions, and geopolitical events. For your safety when using the turn-by-turn navigation feature, always pay attention to posted road signs and current road conditions, and follow safe driving practices and traffic regulations.

There's basically no difference between the two. If the argument didn't arise when Google released their Maps product, or when MapQuest released their product, then there's no reason to be making the same argument against Apple for their maps product. The idea that someone will use Maps to get to a hospital and end up dying or becoming severely injured because they were told to take a left at Alberkerky and got lost is pretty weak. We might as well start arguing about how US Republicans are going to kill grandma and US Democrats are going to redistribute your wealth because that argument has more of a chance of actually affecting the lives of people, but is still as much of a emotionally charged fallacy as maps causing injury or death.

[1] https://maps.google.com/help/terms_maps.html [2] http://images.apple.com/legal/sla/docs/iOS6.pdf

Re: The Amazing iOS 6 Maps

#125

Post by shinratdr »

incongruity wrote: post #50
jpxxx wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't matter to customers whether or not the data will eventually improve - there are significant feature and quality regressions today that will cause delays in iOS6 adoption and directly work against the popular perception of their most important product. Everyone get their digs in now, because the titan doesn't stumble often.

Apple has been virtually printing money with the iOS products because they consistently, if incrementally, offered better and better products. Products that, for most users, offered a genuinely good to great experience and products that challenged the market to be better – far better – than they had before. This, as far as I can tell, is the first really big snafu in the user experience and that may be worrisome. The…

> The thing is – and what the apple fans are all afraid of (but few may admit) is that this isn't just a stumble, but rather, the first major indicator of what a post-Steve Jobs Apple product experience is like.

I'm not afraid of it because it's bullshit. Where do we lay the blame for the YouTube app then? Or the huge engineering problems with the original MacBook Air? When Steve Jobs tried to kill iTunes for Windows and the App Store, how was he looking out for the user experience? I have little doubt the much-derided contacts app for Mac and iPad was a direct order from SJ. His influence was a mixed bag.

The only people who deify Steve Jobs' every move in Apple like that are people that aren't actually fans or aren't actually paying attention. Steve Jobs had a great vision, but he made bad decisions and good ones. As long as Apple is still doing exponentially better this week than last week, and they are, then the naive ones in this equation are the ones placing any amount of weight on "post-Jobs Apple" yet. We aren't even close to that.

Re: The Amazing iOS 6 Maps

#126

Post by shinratdr »

grey-area wrote: post #95

For those who think this is just a problem with the 3D images, or are not convinced there are serious problems even after seeing this tumblr, try looking outside of California, at both satellite and standard maps. Some example searches: "Brighton, UK", Satellite - a major UK city is so blurry you can't see streets. "Grand Cayman, Cayman Islands" - ends up in the middle of the sea, and no roads on the islands at all.…

Arguable, but there is something to be said for pushing it out there. Maybe it would have been better as a staggered release, but it's not like they need to wait for the next update to solve these problems. These are all issues with server-side map quality, which can be updated on-the-fly.

We can only hope they're aggressively removing dead POIs and adding new ones. If it has been a week and nothing has changed for anyone, I would start to worry.

Re: The Amazing iOS 6 Maps

#127

Post by rburhum »

smikhanov wrote: post #33
rburhum wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Apple will have something much better in one year 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-tw…

I meant "much better" than what Apple already has.

I don't think it will be easy for them to catch up (it would be absurd to say that they can have something better than Google Maps in such a short time).

What bothers me a lot, is that most people blame the data errors to the algorithms or ability of the team to create good software. You can have the best coders in the world, and if they have data that is not good, they can only algorithmically clean it so much.

Google has several vehicles that they drive around and collect all kinds of information themselves. Sure you can hire Navteq (or in Apple's case, TomTom aka TeleAtlas) to go around and do it for you. Guess what? When you license products from either of those companies that means you are relying on their editors. That means no fancy object recognition geotagged image that you can send to a support vector machine to flag an area as needed revision... the product you get from that licensing is the vector line with the attributes already attached to them. So that is what you work with.

Google has an entire army in India, using Google-made custom editing tools that do these things. Unless Apple builds the same, they will always be behind. Can Apple do it? Sure! They have the cash and the talent. Will they? It is up to them to decide if investing 400 million into their mapping infrastructure is worth it. I think it is.

Re: The Amazing iOS 6 Maps

#128

Post by headhuntermdk »

ledlauzis wrote: post #21

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

OSX was based on code from FreeBSD and NetBSD and not Linux http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OS_X#History and Apple has used plenty of open source solutions (gcc, samba come to mind ). Not to mention putting money and resources behind opensource projects such as llvm and webkit.

I do believe that dumping Google was a strategic decision and I'm perfectly O.K. with that. The world is full of products that are shaped more with business decisions that technical ones. What remains to be seen however is how quickly they will address the shortcomings of their map data.

Re: The Amazing iOS 6 Maps

#129

Post by derfclausen »

In regards to "Where did my university’s buildings go?" (http://theamazingios6maps.tumblr.com/post/31928845471/where-...), it does bother me that so many universities have provided specific map details to Google (see http://google-latlong.blogspot.com/2012/02/map-your-campus-a...), but not OSM.

Re: The Amazing iOS 6 Maps

#130

Post by hcarvalhoalves »

CoachRufus87 wrote: post #54
acomjean wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably a business decision. Apple probably decided that having core phone functionality in the hands of a competitor wasn't such a good idea. Also Apple users were helping the competition with all the information they were uploading about geographic data. When the original iphone shipped with google maps (and the Google CEO on hand), Apple and Google were partners, now not so much.

Do you think Google will eventually release a 3rd party maps app?

They'll have to. They make money on map advertising anyway, not being on iOS anymore is a big chunk of the market.

Unless you believe the Google fanboys, who think Google should exploit this to drive Android sales.

In the end it's better than the previous situation for iPhone users, because instead of a stagnant mapping application that wasn't updated for years for political reasons, we'll have competition now - as long as Apple is willing to accept Google Maps on their App Store, which I think they would, since there are many already (even a TomTom one).

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