This is how I feel about the two companies as a whole:
Apple make things look amazing and work decently.
Google make things work amazingly and look decent.
Apple's New Map
291–300 of 377 posts
Re: Apple's New Map
#292I 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…
I wonder how this happens. If Apple has the capacity to detect grass strips between roads, how do they misplace an entire part of town (into the ocean, no less). Isn't there some sort of process in place to detect false positives?
This often happens when a map is made from data purchased from different suppliers.
Imagine you buy in the outline of landmasses from some other company. If you pay staff to 'correct' those errors, it will be mostly wasted effort, since those changes won't be sent back to the supplier and won't make it into the next version of the suppliers data.
Likewise, if you start merging your data and their data in a way which isn't 100% legally separable, you get into all kinds of trouble. Flagging up where your own street map is in conflict with the suppliers ocean map could could as 'deriving' your street map from their ocean map, meaning you no longer have all the rights to your street map.
Re: Apple's New Map
#293You know what I really never use the map on my phone for? Figuring out how many trees there are. Do the directions work?
It depends greatly on use case. When I’m hiking somewhere “in the country”, it’s of tremendous help to see every tree (and even what type) and shed on a map as it helps me with orientation.
When I’m blasting down a highway, not so much.
Re: Apple's New Map
#294> 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.
Each building in the world probably took thousands of man-hours to construct. Mapping said building probably takes a matter of minutes.
In a world sense, the economics of making the map are very cheap.
Re: Apple's New Map
#295Earlier quoted context omitted.
But that's what I don't like about the apple map. Check out the image where he says: > Regardless of how Apple is creating all of its buildings and other shapes, Apple is filling its map with so many of them that Google now looks empty in comparison: https://static1.squarespace.com/static/54ff63f0e4b0bafce6932... Yeah, the google view has a lot less green, but it's really a different kind of green -- it shows me wher…
Google does have vegetation and desert data, but you can see that it starts to fade around zoom level 5 in the US (at which you can only see a number of entire states and the names of major cities). If you go somewhere else on the planet, e.g. along the Amazon river, you see that the vegetation data reappears, only to start fading again at zoom level 11 or so. It's too irregular and following satellite imagery too cl…
Describing zoom levels as numbers isn't common... Do you work for a mapping provider?
Re: Apple's New Map
#296Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
> of which copy and paste, though the most familiar, is really one of the worst in UX. I call bullshit on this. I'm using copy/paste on the phone all the time. In using it between many different applications. The way you described it the operation would have to be implemented separately for everything. Text field to phone, text to phone with editing it, phone app (incoming number) to every-single-app-taking-text, etc…
Your right on that. I'm not trying to say copy paste doesn't have any uses. But a lot of people flock to copy paste as the first (and only) solution to every problem when more UX friendly and effective methods exist.
But personally I cringe every time I have to copy and paste a address on my phone into map or the address book. The software can know its and address, phone number or any other object and provide context specific solutions for it.
Re: Apple's New Map
#297Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I only wish there was a FAQ for using OSM instead of Google Maps. From what I gather after reading many HN threads, OSM is the way to go, except they don't want to use the OSM page for daily navigation, you're supposed to find some provider of some of the mapping data, etc.
How do you want to use it? On your android phone you can just get an app like Maps.me, or OSMAnd.
Re: Apple's New Map
#298Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
At company I worked for (czech search engine Seznam.cz), the map team made an awesome 1st April easter egg when they took this to the eleven: https://mapy.cz/textova?x=15.5603819&y=49.5896653&z=13 (it just says 'roadroadroad', 'houseshouseshouses', 'riverriverriver' ... :))
I know you know it says roarroadroad but to me it looks foreign. When I zoom in I see this as great:
And if Kopec in the lower center were the name of a street, I think it's great that it's written there.
The only thing missing is the red dots, so instead of roadroadroadroad it said road·road·road·road (by the way you might wonder why I made the dots red in my example: it's so the eye can just focus on the red dots to sparsely get the road's path.)
I just don't see the issue at all. It's way better, at that zoom level, to have to use my human ability to notice and ignore patterns and ignore noise while concentrating on what I want, than to use two fingers to try to zoom in enough for the map to place the names. I just don't see the issue with the view you presented. It looks great!
Re: Apple's New Map
#299Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
That's a good way to see it, but the copy-paste comparison is bad. Copy-paste is so low-level that I can do everything with it, without the iOS having to wait years to get the functionality (if ever) e.g. I want to translate a message. Either I wait for every messenger/OS to get a decent in-app translator, or I use copy-paste into Google Translate — very clunky, but better than not being able to.
The copy paste is bad indeed. But for me it was the first time I saw the difference between what I want and what I need in software. Apple was definitely to late with adding it to their iOS and has not been active enough in providing proper alternatives to copy and pasting like I mention above. Although I'm somewhat of an Apple fanboy (no iphone btw), they really disappointed me with this.
But with most things people hate change and will often not adopt to new things. The famous non Henry Ford quote comes to mind: If you asked people what they want they would wanted a faster horse (and not a car).
I think I'm just sour Apple didn't seize their opportunity to provide the proper alternate solutions for copy paste (before/alongside with it) when they had the chance.
I don't know what the current state on iOS is, but on android you often have context buttons (dial, navigate) next to copy/paste buttons when you select a address or phone number.
Re: Apple's New Map
#300Hilarious 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. Hilarious that you consider that they consider the job done. This is a random blog post. For one "they" made no official statement about considering the job done. Second, obviously this is just an incremental rollout. Third, TFA mentions they already have data for (but not exposed) something like 90% of the US.
Apple won’t view the maps as “done”. I met a member of their maps team during one of their visits to Toyota. To them, maps are a living, breathing entity that is always changing. When sourcing local data providers they prefer someone that will be updating & maintaining the map rather than just licensing it.