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Apple's New Map

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Re: Apple's New Map

#231

Post by kryptiskt »

aequitas wrote: post #199
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…

> 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 iPho…

> (eg: recognise numbers on a page and make them clickable links directly to phone app)

I hate that! That makes it unnecessarily hard to copy order numbers and the like on my iPhone.

Phoning is legacy functionality, I almost never want to use a number as a phone number.

Copy/Paste on the other hand, that's very useful. I can copy the bits I want, anywhere I want, without dumb as hell software trying to guess what I actually want to do.

Re: Apple's New Map

#232

Post by saagarjha »

astrange wrote: post #144
sumedh wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> he worked on Apple's maps team before For some reason I thought he is some random guy just passionate about maps, I was actually looking for donate me buttons on the site because I love reading his articles whenever they are posted to HN.

Only a former employee could be so relentlessly negative about the product. Notice he's never ended his articles saying anything nice about it? Nobody else would know what to look for.

I didn't find the article to be "relentlessly negative" at all. It seemed pretty neutral, in fact.

Re: Apple's New Map

#233

Post by [deleted] »

davedx wrote: post #228
gambiting wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would say map quality for someone living outside of the "bubble", map quality goes as follows: TomTom then Google Maps then literally anything else, then Apple Maps at the very end. It's hilarious how empty Apple Maps are, and considering that until very recently they were the only option for Apple CarPlay for navigation, that was extremely bad. Seriously, it was so bad that I would consider my car's built-in, shit…

Not in the Netherlands. Here any in-car navigation - even in my wife's 1 year old Seat Leon - is never as up-to-date as either of the major native Maps apps (Google or Apple). I exclusively use Apple Maps for navigating in the Netherlands (and elsewhere in Europe). I can count on one hand the number of times it's led us astray. In fact, I think more like two fingers. The one time that stands out is navigating through…

[deleted]

Re: Apple's New Map

#234

Post by gitgud »

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

Really? Google Maps works pretty well on Android, [1] when you zoom in, street names pop up where possible...

[1] https://i.imgur.com/c1Mtj57.png

Re: Apple's New Map

#235

Post by pmontra »

toasterlovin wrote: post #182
ehsankia wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed. Having hyper accurate greenery mapping may make for a cool tech demo, but has very little utility. Maps are about information density and color utility. Having 10 different shades of green doesn't really convey anything that's useful for my normal usecase.

Disagree, FWIW. Knowing how the land is shaped and what’s on it helps me navigate much better. Green things on the map that don’t correspond to green things in the environment are not super useful to me.

Don't we have aerial and satellite view for that? Disclaimer: I don't know if Apple Maps has a satellite view (never owned an Apple device) and I very rarely use Google Maps for navigation so I don't know if those views can be used while navigating.

However I've got the feeling that the new and less detailed maps are made for the use case of navigation, with a voice telling us what to do. Road names are important only when we are discovering what's around us or where we want to go. If this is a less important use case now, street names go away. Still it should be possible to build an app that works on a sensible way in both navigation and discovery mode.

Re: Apple's New Map

#236

Post by de_watcher »

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…

I've noticed that I don't know the street names at all.

They are only useful when navigating without GPS. And it's infuriating when you try to use a Google Map as a paper map: there aren't any street names on Google Map to be able to find the correct intersection to turn.

Re: Apple's New Map

#237

Post by gambiting »

kingkongjaffa wrote: post #225
gambiting wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would say map quality for someone living outside of the "bubble", map quality goes as follows: TomTom then Google Maps then literally anything else, then Apple Maps at the very end. It's hilarious how empty Apple Maps are, and considering that until very recently they were the only option for Apple CarPlay for navigation, that was extremely bad. Seriously, it was so bad that I would consider my car's built-in, shit…

for driving Waze is number 1 for me

Waze doesn't even exist outside of the US.

Edit: Ok, this is wrong, sorry. I searched for "Waze UK" on google and the first result just takes me to the US site.

Re: Apple's New Map

#238

Post by chrisseaton »

jillesvangurp wrote: post #211

Hilarious that they consider the job done after covering the Bay area. They are years away from doing this world wide. Most of their iphone revenue is from outside of California. I used to work in Nokia in the maps division that later became Here. I still remember when Nokia disrupted a market then dominated by the likes Tom Tom and a few others by giving away the maps for free along with every phone. Initially this…

> Hilarious that they consider the job done after covering the Bay area.

It's the whole of northern California isn't it? I wouldn't refer to places like Eureka as 'the Bay Area'.

Re: Apple's New Map

#240

Post by Griffinsauce »

gambiting wrote: post #237
kingkongjaffa wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

for driving Waze is number 1 for me

Waze doesn't even exist outside of the US. Edit: Ok, this is wrong, sorry. I searched for "Waze UK" on google and the first result just takes me to the US site.

What? It does, a lot of people in The Netherlands use it. That probably means it's available in most developed countries.
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