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Apple's New Map

justinobeirne.com

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Re: Apple's New Map

#331

Post by GuiA »

reaperducer wrote: post #104

It absolutely blows my mind that map products ship without street names clearly visible at all times. I agree. The place where Google Maps and, to a slightly lesser extent, Apple Maps fall down is in labeling roads. I can't count the number of times I've zoomed in on a map and it shows every little sushi joint in the neighborhood, but no street names. And no amount of zooming in or out will fix it. It's similarly fru…

You can do this right now for Open Street Map :) the pay is terrible ($0), but the resulting data is open!

https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Contribute_map_data

Re: Apple's New Map

#333

Post by NDizzle »

Cool, my very own Yuba City featured on the maps update. Indeed, it's pretty nice... But I'm still more excited about being able to use Waze in Carplay than any kind of Apple maps updates.

Re: Apple's New Map

#334

Post by Crespyl »

dpkonofa wrote: post #321
ethbro wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>we are talking about maps that don't show road names here Can you provide a use case where that would be necessary for a situation where you're not using the navigation? A lot of people seem to think this is a requirement for a map but when are you ever using a map to find a specific street where navigation wouldn't be far easier?

Any time you're looking at a locally saved/cached copy of the map but don't have the network connection to make navigation requests? Or are just trying to find your own (or your friends) position in a situation where you have spotty or unavailable GPS.

Do Google or Apple let you use navigation offline? I know it can continue an existing route if the connection drops, but I've never tried to start navigation somewhere while offline.

Re: Apple's New Map

#335

Post by jameshatheway »

doque wrote: post #216
jameshatheway wrote: post #153

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…

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?

I thought maybe who (or what, if it was automated) was tracing the map from a satellite view got confused by the mangroves in the middle of the island, since its dark color does sort of look like the nearby ocean... but it doesn't explain the ocean shapes on the west side of the island (around Seven Mile Beach and in West Bay)... and I'd have thought there'd be some double checking against traditional maps at the higher level.

What's really interesting for me is at the beginning on launch of Apple Maps, there was only the major road and the airport marked, now most of the roads are there.. overplayed on top of the body mass which is still wrong. Its almost as if , while updating their road mapping to be more accurate, they have never in the past 5 years or so updated the shape of the land masses themselves

Re: Apple's New Map

#336

Post by kurthr »

nazca wrote: post #133

I think the author missed that the old version, and Google Maps currently, typically use green to denote certain types of public land (parks, national forest, etc.) not vegetation per se. Apple is solving a different use case by color coding by vegetation. And It's one that I think is less useful. KNowing that there is vegetation on someone else's private land isn't really that useful to me. But knowing the boundarie…

Also weird that in the very first picture they added a blue lake (next to Pyramid Lake) that is currently and has been dry for a while... I guess they're betting on rain?

Re: Apple's New Map

#337

Post by LeoNatan25 »

saagarjha wrote: post #232
astrange wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Leave it to fanboys to see “relentless negativism” in legitimate criticism.

Re: Apple's New Map

#339

Post by logicallee »

logicallee wrote: post #137
fouc wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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

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…

(Too late to edit, but I just noticed that imgur makes my pictures look like garbage on mobile. You may have to request the desktop view briefly to see what I saw when making the comment on desktop.)

Re: Apple's New Map

#340

Post by Macha »

keyle wrote: post #2

On a side note I can't even imagine how big that webpage was. If you like animated gifs, boy have I got the page for you! All in all, what I've learnt is how many petabytes must be involved in mapping the US and the world and the 3D aspects.

It kills the browser on my old tablet, presumably from using too much memory (as the same browser version on my smartphone has no issue with it).
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