241–250 of 377 posts
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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.
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> Try a European or Asian city with lots of twisty roads and alleys and it gets much harder. I showed what would happen if you literally follow the rule "whenever [...] there's enough room on a visible street to put a label, then put the label". That's the specification. If you show me a twisty road with no room for a label, then according to this specification it doesn't get the label. The specification (for what we…
That’s a misunderstanding of the spec. The ask is to put in at least one label if there is space (when previously there were none). Filling all available space with redundant labels is not the ask.
# Label all streets as much as possible
for (each street on screen):
while (that street has room for a label): # (even if already labeled)
put a label on that street # i.e. an additional one
# Try to label unlabeled streets
for (each street on screen)
if (no label on screen for that street): # if unlabeled
if (street has room for a label): # ...can we fix?
put a label on that street # ...then fix
As a followup, could you please define "street has room for a label"? When do you consider that a street has room for a label?
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’m not sure. It seems the maps are much less usable for visual delivery of information. I can barely see the streets because of the contrast choices, the 3D buildings obscure the streets, and the streets are always missing their names. The new Apple and Google designs push us to enter a destination where in the past all I would have needed was a quick glance.
Knowing and tracking where we are going is valuable information to the map providers; helping us get there without finding out where we want to go really isn’t.
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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
I did have a hilarious issue for a while where it didn't know about either of the Severn River crossings into Wales (and yeah I didn't have it set to avoid toll roads). Not only did it not know about the "new" bridge, which is something like 20 years old, it didn't even know about the "old" bridge :D
The sodding thing used to try to take me via Gloucester (+2 hours to the trip) and didn't have any idea what was going on when I was on the bridge it didn't believe in.
Thankfully this is now fixed!
I've been browsing this recently for Ireland http://map.geohive.ie/mapviewer.html
Really nice tool to see old maps/aerial photos overlaid with current surveys. Photos go back 25 years and maps back to the 1800s
Great use of public money by Ordnance Survey Ireland to provide public access to public data.
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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.
I used to live in the Cayman Islands (Grand Cayman specifically), and my issue with Apple Maps is, forget about the enhanced details being mentioned in this article, the actual landmass on the map is WRONG, and I just checked - its still wrong. Roads and roundabouts and my condo, and Camana Bay (big mixed commercial living area) apparently in the ocean. Its been like this since they introduced it. Here's a side by si…
The original Google Maps showed all the street names on all the streets, so you didn't have to guess. Later versions of Google Maps didn't do this, so on some streets, you would have no idea what the street names were, and would have to zoom out or scroll out until you saw the name. THIS is what I want fixed. I don't care about vegetation, I want to be able to see what the street names are without distracting myself…
The original Google Maps was pre-rendered in a gigantic MapReduce. It had many fewer landmarks. The modern Google Maps does a lot of the layout and rendering on the client or on the fly, with a differing set of constraints and tradeoffs. It also has many more landmarks. You can see this in action by going to https://mapstyle.withgoogle.com/ and playing with the "Landmarks" control.
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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 st…
So that's the navigational use case for 'meet person'
Another common use case is 'proceed to building at 123 Long Street'. I've met several confused tourists and couriers whose satnav has dumped them at, say, 973 Long Street with an arrival fanfare.