141–150 of 384 posts
iPhone 4S with iOS 5 > iPhone 5 with iOS 6 Nice work Apple - that's going to save me a few hundred dollars!
Your comment is relative and adds very little to the discussion here.
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e.g. if I search for the hospital and I eventually find it 3 miles down the road from where the map took me, how would Apple/their mapping partners ever know that the POI should be moved? One possibility is that the phone keeps track of the fact that "you drove 3 miles past where you were 'supposed' to stop, and then stopped at some other (specific) location." As more and more people do that --- search the hospital,…
There are lot of privacy problems with essentially having every iphone phone home with where it is all the time.
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…
I don't think Apple gets a pass here. If they are forcing users onto their product it had better be competitive, no matter how hard it is. Microsoft got so such pass with WP7 and that was an entirely new OS/platform!
People seem to think "amazing" == "cool". Not so! It just means astonishing or surprising. Which makes the word so much more interesting to use. "We charge $9 for a bottle of Corona." "That's amazing!"*
So the iOS 6 maps really truly are amazing :)
*True story
I live in New York City. Sometimes Google doesn't put the street names on all the streets. I often have to scroll left or right or out to see what street it's on. Obviously you can't list the names on every street when it is zoomed out, but even when there aren't more than 4 or 5 streets on the map, the street names still don't appear. It's like they'd rather list local restaurants than street names. Has anyone else experienced this with Google maps?
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"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
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> 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.
It's not like Apple "usually reverts in quality" either. This was a business decision, probably forced. They had to create something of their own for maps from what they could license and buy quickly.
Goes to show that you should not depend on your competitors for core technology. Which Apple always tries to avoid, but probably in 2007 (when the iPhone come out) the didn't think of Google as a competitor. They weren't in the phone business back then...
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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.
Ask yourself, "How can Google make sooo much money on search advertising?" I mean seriously, rounded to the nearest billion they don't have any other businesses. The insight that explains it is that search advertising exploits the fact that the consumer is "looking" and they have what they are looking for "the query". When that signals a possible purchase intent "car safety reviews" for example, at that instant in time Google gives advertisers a way to put their message in front of the consumer's eyeballs when they are most receptive to that message. The effectiveness of a car dealership advertisement in a Harry Potter movie preview? Lots of eyeballs, few if any looking for a car. In a search query on cars? Lots of eyeballs, many if not most of which are looking for a car. This is what makes search advertising an insanely better advertising vehicle then pretty much any other form of advertisement.
Now lets look at maps on mobile devices. This has the same fundamental super power as search advertising, mobile maps are a search api. Many people don't put that together but when you are using your mobile device's maps you are seeking out directions, what you are looking for signals intent, and on that intent one can build a very profitable advertising platform. If I pull out my iPad and click 'coffee shops' on the maps search box I have signaled both where I am, and that I'm looking for a coffee shop. As a shop owner how much would you pay to have that person go to your shop? $0.50? $1? $2? How do you know your ad worked? Well there is an NFC payment, or a coupon you can offer up on the mobile device, or your local WiFi hotspot (remember that?) can tell you that the wifi mac address of the device that did the maps search, just walked into range of your hotspot.
Do you see it yet? Mobile Maps is as big a business as Google's search advertising business and its still un-plundered. Apple will do everything they can to 'dominate' this particular 'free to use' service.
[1] Best scene ever in "Charlie's War"