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Apple's New Map

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Re: Apple's New Map

#131

Post by megablast »

bitcurious wrote: post #20

>In other words, TomTom’s database somehow has roads from Parkfield’s boomtown days—roads that have been gone for more than 75 years. No wonder why Apple removed them. Another possible explanation is the TomTom was using these unlikely to be visited streets as trap streets. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trap_street >In cartography, a trap street is a fictitious entry in the form of a misrepresented street on a map, o…

Trap streets are one odd street, not a whole town. This is clearly not what is happening at all.

Re: Apple's New Map

#132

Post by theoh »

ariwilson wrote: post #53
rconti wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The arbitrary transition from green to brown on the old maps, when in reality, there is no such transition, is the real problem. When navigating by foot those shapes SHOULD be accurate; I care less about the legal boundaries of the exact park and more about what i'm seeing as I walk around.

Why do you care that the map represents the green parts accurately? How does that enhance your walking experience? IMO 99% of the time people use maps to get to destinations, so maps should be focused on destinations, not shapes (insofar as the shapes don't prevent you from getting to your destination).

The shape of e.g. a wooded area can be important for orientation when on foot.

But really, maps are nothing but shapes (streets, waterways, coastlines) that constrain navigation on the ground, so it's difficult to make sense of your proposed focus on destinations to the exclusion of shapes.

Re: Apple's New Map

#133

Post by nazca »

I think the author missed that the old version, and Google Maps currently, typically use green to denote certain types of public land (parks, national forest, etc.) not vegetation per se. Apple is solving a different use case by color coding by vegetation. And It's one that I think is less useful. KNowing that there is vegetation on someone else's private land isn't really that useful to me. But knowing the boundaries of a national forest is extremely useful.

Re: Apple's New Map

#134

Post by kalleboo »

xvector wrote: post #21

I think this article illustrates a critical issue with Apple's software. The stance on privacy means little machine learning can take place. Little machine learning means that Apple has to resort to more manual techniques. This, in turn, leads to the far inferior (and often dangerously incorrect) place databases and issues with their Maps application. And then users will simply turn to an alternative which absolutely…

How can violating someone's privacy improve their place database? Extract "I'm waiting at now" from people's iMessage chats???

Google has been connecting place names by OCRing storefronts taken with their street view cars. Apple claim to be doing the same thing (but apparently doing a far worse job of it)

Re: Apple's New Map

#135

Post by TylerE »

rconti wrote: post #46
cronix wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except that the new map makes it seem as though California is some lush, green, tropical land. I think the green is way over-emphasized on the new map compared to the old, which is a bit more realistic looking to my eyes.

The arbitrary transition from green to brown on the old maps, when in reality, there is no such transition, is the real problem. When navigating by foot those shapes SHOULD be accurate; I care less about the legal boundaries of the exact park and more about what i'm seeing as I walk around.

If you're navigating on foot why aren't you using a topo map?

Re: Apple's New Map

#137

Post by logicallee »

fouc wrote: post #116
crazygringo wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's obviously an intentional choice to avoid too much screen clutter... but I agree it's infuriating. I've spoken in the past with some people who work on Maps products and have heard "people say they want it but then they really don't..." and I honestly can't imagine what UX studies are telling them that. All the time I see a destination and I'm trying to figure out what closest cross street I should stop at and by…

>Whenever you zoom in enough that there's enough room on a visible street to put a label, then put the label! I mean if I zoom in so far that only the one street is visible and there's no other text on it, but Maps still leaves it blank... it just feels inexcusable. Agreed. Happens on google maps too, and that's just so irritating

someone else said that according to a Google engineer we don't "really" want it and I wanted to see if this is true.

I put in a random street (mission street in San Fransciso), this how it looked for me on desktop:

https://imgur.com/a/aOERdLR

Then I started filling out streets with the continuous name of the street (first copy and pasting the name in small squares, then by hand adding red dots to separate them). This is how it looked after:

https://imgur.com/a/xQiF6pm

I was pretty careless/moved quickly, but that should match some of the effect of imperfect algorithmic mapping decisions. The key insight is that even if one specific crook looks horid (not enough space to lay it out neatly), humans will just look at another part of the street to determine the name. But if it's really a little nook where the crooked letters don't contain enough information we'll pinch/zoom in to make it big enough to display legibly. If you really look closely at my picture you will see places where I totally garbled street names through careless copy and pasting and overlap. No problem at all.

The "after" is much more beautiful/useful.

But notice two streets are blank: https://imgur.com/a/I24REM0

This is because their name didn't appear even a single time in my view. that means even though I'm on desktop and there's plenty of space, I would have to zoom or scroll to see them! They're literally information that is missing from the map.

For other streets I had to look a fair way away to copy and paste, since the street name wasn't anywhere near where I was working. (For example, looking at my first, original map, suppose you're at the top-left point, on Jersey street: how long do you go down Jersey street to the right, before you hit the Jersey and Church street intersection? This is a super common question!)

I think the resulting map is extremely repetitive, but pretty useful/beautiful. Humans can filter out repetitive information really easily. It's just no problem for us at all. Tasks such as the one I mentioned, where you are about to go down Jersey street and need to know when you'll hit Church street, are some of the main types of navigation tasks we do every day.

So I don't see the issue with making the repetitive map. Instead of roads, it should just repeat the name of the road.

(On the other hand, those of you who disagree can at least see what the Google engineer was talking about.)

Re: Apple's New Map

#138

Post by kbumsik »

I'm using iPhone and iPad but I would never bother with Apple Map as long as it's only available in their app.

I have marked a lot of stars and labels for places. If these are not available on my Linux laptop or web browsers they are totally worthless.

I know Apple made MapKit for embedding and you can share links but it is miles away from enough. Apple has to fully open their map for browsers and even Android to make it actually useful but I doubt they will.

Re: Apple's New Map

#139

Post by jacobolus »

thrower123 wrote: post #115
MaysonL wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And heck, it would be very easy to make this a setting: yes or no, this user wants as many street names as possible.

Member when software had lots of options how to configure it to show you the information you wanted? Peppridge Farms remembers. Also VLC and a few other weird fringe holdouts...

Ah yes, wouldn’t it be nice if every piece of software had as buggy and unusable an interface as VLC https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18219757

Re: Apple's New Map

#140

Post by ceejayoz »

crazygringo wrote: post #71
stevenjohns wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's your use case. I've used maps a lot to try to find hidden or secluded parks -- often with great success. I'm talking postcard-perfect views around the Sydney harbor, small beaches around various bays, isolated parks near beautiful rivers and a whole lot of other places that are really beautiful and probably only known to the locals. Lots of these places were a brisk walk away from high-traffic areas too. This…

That's great... but wouldn't satellite view be better for that anyways? Would you even trust an "interpreted" map with levels of green for what you're doing?

Satellite views can be too busy for some uses.
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