311–320 of 377 posts
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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.
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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…
Hmm, for google maps not knowing which streets are one-way - that is not true for Switzerland. Sending you to streets that you can't enter (and have to suddenly find ways around in heavy traffic) would render any city navigation effectively useless for me, and outright dangerous too. It definitely works, at least I can confirm for bigger cities. Hopefully your (and other) areas will get updated soon with something as…
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> It literally boggles my mind why Apple still think using Yelp for POI data is a good idea. As opposed to what source of readily available data? They already use several sources anyway (including their own scanning), Yelp is just one of many.
Foursquare would be a better source as that is still popular in many European countries.
I don't know a single person with a backyard tennis court, and there appear to be 6 in a small area here. Where am I looking?
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Member when software had lots of options how to configure it to show you the information you wanted? Peppridge Farms remembers. Also VLC and a few other weird fringe holdouts...
Ah yes, wouldn’t it be nice if every piece of software had as buggy and unusable an interface as VLC https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18219757
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> 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.
"...it’s a dramatically different map from before, with a staggering amount of vegetation detail"
"...what’s really remarkable about this new vegetation detail it how deep it all goes—all the way down to the strips of grass and vegetation between roads"
"...some of these upgraded buildings are spectacularly detailed"
"...Apple is filling its map with so many of them that Google now looks empty in comparison"
"...Apple hasn’t just closed the gap with Google—but has, in many ways, exceeded it"
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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.
Did we read the same article? "...it’s a dramatically different map from before, with a staggering amount of vegetation detail" "...what’s really remarkable about this new vegetation detail it how deep it all goes—all the way down to the strips of grass and vegetation between roads" "...some of these upgraded buildings are spectacularly detailed" "...Apple is filling its map with so many of them that Google now looks…
And the footnotes are relentlessly negative about Apple:
"These building height regressions are surprising because they contradict TechCrunch’s claim that Apple’s buildings are now 'more accurate'."
"Consider that just two years after it started adding algorithmically extracted buildings to its map, Google had already added the majority of the U.S.’s buildings. But after four years, Apple has only added buildings in 64% of California and 9% of Nevada."
"All of this new detail is not without cost. In many areas, Apple Maps’s roads are now harder to see than before."
"Part of the reason why Yelp’s place database is so much smaller than Google’s is because Yelp is largely focused on businesses with consumer-facing storefronts. And you can see the consequences of this on Apple’s map, especially with government-related places."
"Or maybe the issue is that Apple’s extraction algorithms just aren’t as good as Google’s yet?"
"Another advantage of the Local Guides program is that Google owns everything that’s contributed, including all of the photos."
"For instance, here’s the Six Flags Great America theme park that’s just seven miles away from Apple’s headquarters." (With a shot of Great America lacking detail in Apple's map.)
"It’s odd that Apple refuses to track trip start/end points but sees nothing wrong with mapping tennis and baskball courts in people’s backyards."
"It’s almost as if Google is saying this is now a map of destinations—all of the places it’ll be able to take you to, someday soon."
"I think Google’s ambitions here run far deeper than being just another Yelp or Foursquare. If you zoom out on everything Google is doing, you see the makings of a much larger, end-to-end travel platform."
It's kind of interesting -- it's as if halfway through he forgot that he was writing about improvements in Apple's mapping and decided he was writing about the promise of Google's mapping as a new kind of platform.
But either way, this is a classic rhetoric. It's the bit where you praise a specific thing to the skies, then pull back and reveal how in the big picture that thing doesn't matter so much. Note that I'm not saying he's wrong. I'm just saying that this is not, over all, an article that praises Apple.
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…
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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?
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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.