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Apple's New Map

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Re: Apple's New Map

#171

Post by mulmen »

Brakenshire wrote: post #124
stanleydrew wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should read all the way to the end. "AVs navigate themselves—so all we’ll really need to know is where we want to go. And Google, with a rapidly-growing autonomy project of its own, seems to have caught on to this. "If you zoom out on Google Maps’s recent features, you’ll notice that they’re increasingly about figuring out “where to go?” "And even Google’s map seems to be following this pattern. Over the last two…

The money will be on geodata from mapping being used for a decision engine. “Recommend me a restaurant along my route within my price range” means a huge sponsorship/ad market.

My 9 year old car has this capability built in to the on-board nav system. It includes gas stations, restaurants, rest stops, etc. It also always shows cross and current street names and can seamlessly zoom out to the current continent and has a 3D terrain elevation mode. It was designed over a decade ago.

The difference is that it was designed as a premium option to solve a problem for a user. Modern smartphone apps appear to be more about gathering data and steering users to the platform owner's desired destinations.

Re: Apple's New Map

#172

Post by jldugger »

logicallee wrote: post #154
jjeaff wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm confused, are you only talking about apple maps? I just checked on Google maps and I can easily see all the street names on my screen, as long as I zoom in far enough that there is enough space.

I was specifically exploring this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18359646 I wanted to see how it would look if "whenever you zoom in enough that there's enough room on a visible street to put a label, then put the label!" I think my render looks absolutely fine. I don't see why I wouldn't always use it if I had a toggle switch. Yes it's cluttered if you just glance at it, but we don't use maps as piece…

I think you're misunderstanding the OP's complaint. It's not that streets aren't repeatedly labelled. In fact your before had multiple labels. It's that sometimes google maps chooses not to label things at all until you zoom in more. Or sometimes out, strangely.

Re: Apple's New Map

#173

Post by gordon_freeman »

mulmen wrote: post #60

This is really neat but I don't really care about greenery when I'm using Apple Maps. Can they take a break from figuring out how to convert satellite images into green blobs and devise an algorithm to put street names on the screen ? Apple and Google maps are both worthless as maps without typing in an actual address and using navigation because they can't just show the main cross street names on the screen. It abso…

This. I can not tell you how much I miss having those Street Names appearing in every street when driving through SF Downtown. I had to distract myself from driving and start pinch-zooming in hope to somehow see the street names with worthless efforts. And I am using Google Maps on my Android phone. This should definitely be fixed especially in crowded city Downtowns like Oakland and SF.

Re: Apple's New Map

#174

Post by [deleted] »

_jal wrote: post #100
mulmen wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree it is a deliberate choice and may even be necessary. The problem is how they identify "clutter". To Apple clutter seems to be street names or useful human scale landmarks. To me clutter is the name of a coffee shop four blocks away that happens to be highly ranked on Yelp when I haven't recently searched for coffee shops.

> To me clutter is the name of a coffee shop four blocks away Agree, although I don't find it entirely useless; it allows a bit of mental confirmation along the way if you happen to notice something marquee'd go by. But more generally, there must be a reason or two why this doesn't work, but why leave street name placement "static"? I know it isn't; what I mean is why not accept a touch event to show the name of a st…

[deleted]

Re: Apple's New Map

#175

Post by s1mon »

They’ve added a bunch of green areas, but there is hardly any notation of trails. Neither Google or Apple is great for trail maps in their default form, but at least Google has higher contrast trail markings with names that are occasionally readable. Apple maps are a miserable failure in this regard.

Re: Apple's New Map

#176

Post by cooper12 »

ethbro wrote: post #94
ryandrake wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve worked on mapping software, and in fact on street name placement (Not Google or Apple). The code we had for deciding where and when to draw street names has to be among the most complicated, full-of-edge-cases code I have ever encountered. Engineering is pulling one direction, data providers are pulling another direction. UX is pulling this direction, cartography is pulling that direction. Everybody in the compa…

I think the thing that confuses me and parent is that Maps ALREADY knows about road continuity. And road names. I'm sure I'm missing something, but (1) flow labels along their roads to the center of the screen, (2) separate them with predefined padding, (3) drop labels if visible label count > maximum, smallest-to-largest road, until under the threshold. If UXers want to bitch, hide it behind a layer filter. But hone…

> but we are talking about maps that don't show road names here

That presumes that road names are an intrinsic part of a map. While they certainly were in the past, I think there's a paradigm shift happening that's become so common we don't notice it anymore. We don't tell people to meet us at "The intersection of Street X and Y" as much anymore, we tell them to meet us near a prominent landmark like a park, train station, or restaurant. We barely even need street names for navigation anymore; instead, our software tells us how many blocks to walk and when to turn (even automobile GPS tells us to expect turns in the next X miles). I feel this will be part of a larger revolution where we might start using alternative easy-to-shate GPS coordinates [0], and even completely new map styles like isochrone maps. [1]

[0]: See https://what3words.com/ and Google's https://plus.codes/

[1]: https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/isochrone-maps-commute...

Re: Apple's New Map

#177

Post by et-al »

jldugger wrote: post #172
logicallee wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was specifically exploring this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18359646 I wanted to see how it would look if "whenever you zoom in enough that there's enough room on a visible street to put a label, then put the label!" I think my render looks absolutely fine. I don't see why I wouldn't always use it if I had a toggle switch. Yes it's cluttered if you just glance at it, but we don't use maps as piece…

I think you're misunderstanding the OP's complaint. It's not that streets aren't repeatedly labelled. In fact your before had multiple labels. It's that sometimes google maps chooses not to label things at all until you zoom in more. Or sometimes out, strangely.

Here an example to illustrate jldugger's point:

https://imgur.com/a/hCo3V2X

You struggle to locate the names of the streets--in their absence, Google Maps shoves a bunch of unsolicited retail venues in your face.

Re: Apple's New Map

#178

Post by panic »

ethbro wrote: post #94
ryandrake wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve worked on mapping software, and in fact on street name placement (Not Google or Apple). The code we had for deciding where and when to draw street names has to be among the most complicated, full-of-edge-cases code I have ever encountered. Engineering is pulling one direction, data providers are pulling another direction. UX is pulling this direction, cartography is pulling that direction. Everybody in the compa…

I think the thing that confuses me and parent is that Maps ALREADY knows about road continuity. And road names. I'm sure I'm missing something, but (1) flow labels along their roads to the center of the screen, (2) separate them with predefined padding, (3) drop labels if visible label count > maximum, smallest-to-largest road, until under the threshold. If UXers want to bitch, hide it behind a layer filter. But hone…

Anything moving on a screen will call attention to itself. A bunch of road labels "flowing" around at once turns into a huge mess.

The real problem here is with label conflicts. Say you have an important point of interest in the center of the screen already. If a road label happens to be placed underneath the point of interest label, it will look like the road is unlabeled.

There are clever ways of moving labels around, but: 1. it has to run in realtime on the client, and 2. it has to look good in motion and in all possible situations you can think of (since you have no control over what the data will end up being). This is why older raster maps often have better labeling than newer vector maps -- you can do a lot of precomputation on the server to make sure the labels look nice.

Re: Apple's New Map

#179

Post by tokyodude »

logicallee wrote: post #137
fouc wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

you choose the easiest case, large city blocks in a grid. Try a European or Asian city with lots of twisty roads and alleys and it gets much harder. The maps here are already covered with the names of buildings, stations, parks, hospitals etc...

I often want road names in Tokyo but they are also competing for space of transit lines as well as places with double or triple decker differently named things like there's a freeway named A over aroad named B which is over a Subway line named C

Road names are usually not as important in Japan as they are not used in addresses but they come in handy when explaining to a cab driver how to get somewhere

Re: Apple's New Map

#180

Post by rhizome »

logicallee wrote: post #137
fouc wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

I've had to scroll the length of streets all they way across the entire city before it showed me a street name.
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