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Apple's New Map

justinobeirne.com

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Re: Apple's New Map

#191

Post by rurban »

Lol, he's comparing the two worst map distributors details, and comparing its various mapping mistakes. I didn't see a word about the two other better maps: Microsoft and OpenStreetMap.

Why Microsoft? They collaborated very early with a very good mapping university institute, which invented creating 3d data from stereo images, from air photos and car-level photos (for the facades), and so on, and then offered the city and regional surveyor officed cooperation contracts. they usually gave the best GIS data of all.

A few years later Google came into this business by getting the rights for US satellite data, but with satellite data you are always behind. no 3d extraction possible and always 4 years behind. local airplane stereo photos are done yearly to find illegal buildings and collect taxes for them. they are done by the state and cities.

OpenStreetMap is crowdfunded so the level of detail is unmatched of course.

I coded such 3d extraction from stereo photos in the late 80ies for our local city land surveyor office. the roof details and height was much better then than today's public data in Google or Apple' maps. feature extraction was half automatic, guided with manual help.

Re: Apple's New Map

#192

Post by vatueil »

yen223 wrote: post #181
gwern wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's even worse. He took a simple side-by-side comparison of 2 or 3 images, and invested substantial effort into making it far more annoying and harder to compare by an uncontrollable permanent headache inducing slow flicker which is inferior to our built-in saccades. I hate the GIFs on his pages, they're by far the worst thing on his site and why I don't reshare his otherwise very interesting analyses, because the…

His use of gifs make differences much easier to see, vs putting them side by side.

It works well for some of the comparisons, but for others I would really prefer static shots so I can take my time examining each. Especially the GIFs that compare more than two sources, such as the ones that include Here and Bing as well as Google and Apple maps, where waiting for the GIF to cycle through all four images is annoying.

If the author is willing to implement it, those things some websites use that let the reader click the image or drag a sliding bar over it to compare might work better.

Regardless, I do appreciate the author's insights.

Re: Apple's New Map

#193

Post by ksec »

Osmose wrote: post #45

> And the office’s large headcount (now near 5,000) suggests some sort of manual / labor-intensive process. My partner briefly worked for a human-powered 3d mapping firm; they would get satellite and plane/drone photography of a large swath of land, split it up into block-sized chunks, and then each worker would take a block and use an in-house program to model the buildings at a pretty impressive level of detail. Wo…

Is this even sustainable in a "World" Scale? Because at this rate I don't see this brings Apple to cover all the major cities of world in 10 years time, let alone majority of lands which aren't in these locations.

Re: Apple's New Map

#194

Post by raverbashing »

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…

> because they can't just show the main cross street names on the screen. It absolutely blows my mind that map products ship without street names clearly visible at all times.

Really. It seems they actually put some effort into showing the names of most streets except the one you're interested in. No, really.

It's amazing how often this happens, because it's almost mind reading at this point.

Re: Apple's New Map

#195

Post by brylie »

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…

OpenStreetMap shows street names by default:

https://www.openstreetmap.org/

Also, Mapbox has a powerful map styling UI that lets you choose exactly what map elements to display at a given zoom level:

https://www.mapbox.com/

We can basically build or contribute to alternatives that better suit our needs.

Re: Apple's New Map

#196

Post by ksec »

Out of a total 123,000 employees around the world, more than half of them works in retail. So say we have 60,000, that includes Marketing, Supply Chains, Sales, Management, Engineering, R&D, Finance, Legal, Design, etc.....

You are telling me they have nearly 10% of workforce works on that bloody pieces of crap called Apple Map?

Has any one seen / uses Apple Map in Japan? South Korea? Taiwan? Hong Kong? ( Excludes China because all Data comes from Government ) Australia?

If anyone has been wondering how Apple got $9 billion Raw Profits from Google for being default search engine and their Margin hasn't increase a bit. Here you got the answer.

Seriously - Apple Maps after 5 years is still not good enough. And we expect Great things from Apple. Not Good or Good enough. At least the Apple when it was ran by Steve Jobs.

Re: Apple's New Map

#197

Post by gregknicholson »

et-al wrote: post #177
jldugger wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

Remember, Google's an ad company; think of it from their perspective.

Google wants to push users towards businesses that advertise with them, so that business continue giving Google money and data.

Users are used to working around crap software, so they're unlikely to stop using Google Maps enough to harm Google's business.

So why would Google do anything to improve Google Maps for users if it even slightly harms their core advertising business? Their goal isn't to make the best map; it's to make money (by running a map service).

Re: Apple's New Map

#198

Post by ianleighton »

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…

Let’s also not forget that there are regions/countries where it’s either culturally not always the norm to use street names while giving directions (especially when driving), where in the real world a street name is hard/impossible to find on a sign (try to find and read a small low-contrast stone inlay somewhere up on a building while you drive luckily slowly), or where street names don’t even exist!

When driving in some countries in Europe a GPS will repeat that you should use for multiple steps when in fact the road signs don’t mention the street anywhere and just say “Center”. (Granted sometimes the GPS directions are correct and use signage info.) Or the street name may have changed 5 times, as you keep driving straight on the same road.

The problem, as with all things in maps, isn’t so clear-cut and the fixation on street names is very centric to certain countries.

Re: Apple's New Map

#199

Post by aequitas »

crazygringo wrote: post #73
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…

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…

> All the time I see a destination and I'm trying to figure out what closest cross street I should stop at

Instead of zooming pinching try to click the street to drop a pin and you got the street name.

Old abstractions (maps) on newer media (phones, desktops) offer a UX that cartmakers in the past could only dream off. It is up to us to break our old habits and discover and use this new UX.

For example. When the iPhone first came people complained about the lack of copy and paste. But most of the time people don't _need_ to copy and paste text, eg they _want_ to dial the phone number they see on a webpage. Therefore they _need_ to have the phone number in their phone app. A problem which can be solved many ways (eg: recognise numbers on a page and make them clickable links directly to phone app) of which copy and paste, though the most familiar, is really one of the worst in UX.

This is the difference between what people (think they) want and what they actually need.

Back to maps. People don't want to read street names, they want the nearest address to a certain s point. Of which zooming and pinching or a cluttered screen full of text are by far the most inferior ways to use of the technology available today.

Re: Apple's New Map

#200

Post by xapata »

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…

Keep in mind that many people cannot read a map. At least in the sense of navigating by it. I forget the proportion, but every time someone does a study, it's disheartening. Perhaps Google has done some usability testing and is catering to the "normal" person.

This reminds me of all the complaints about Apple's Touch Bar, saying there aren't affordances for touch typing.

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