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Apple's New Map

justinobeirne.com

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Re: Apple's New Map

#351

Post by Thrymr »

bluntfang wrote: post #324
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…

>Sometimes I fantasize about having a full-time job driving around the country fixing all of Apple Maps' faults. But somehow I suspect the pay would be terrible. I've thought about doing this too, but for hiking trails. I'm sure the pay would be abysmal, but hiking and updating online maps sounds like a blast as a job. I think it could be done fairly well with a simple GPS recorder and serialization, but the biggest…

There is a huge amount of this information maintained by land management agencies (see e.g. [0]). Presumably it is even licensed (in the US at least) in a way that commercial companies could use. But Google Maps coverage of trails and even forest roads is terrible. I presume that you're right, the return is too low, but it is sad that no one is picking up this low hanging fruit. Even OpenStreetMap is hit and miss on this public data (partly because of data import wars).

[0] https://data.fs.usda.gov/geodata/edw/datasets.php?dsetCatego...

Re: Apple's New Map

#352

Post by bllguo »

toasterlovin wrote: post #183
heavymark wrote: post #97

This is a great write up but aweful news for us Apple users who finally thought Apple would be able to catch up with Google Maps. That is the only have part of one state and will be many years until the whole country but the promise that the new data would be near perfect made it worth the wait. Apple continues to favor manual vs automated such as news and music and in each case googles automated approach wins out. Y…

I’m pretty sure the plan is to roll out the rest of the US in the next year. Not sure about the rest of the world, though.

If the speculation is correct that these features are manually added, I don't see how that's remotely possible within a year.

of course, simply extrapolating the current rate of progress gives a similarly dismal outlook.

Re: Apple's New Map

#353

Post by Baeocystin »

jefftk wrote: post #143
logicallee wrote: post #137

Earlier 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…

I can't tell whether you're getting serious, but I'm pretty sure most users would not prefer your change. It's so dense it's hard to read, and in a repetitive way.

I would 100% prefer the change. That's how most of the paper maps I used at the time used to be, and it was wonderful, because they were more useful tools.

Re: Apple's New Map

#354

Post by onemoresoop »

logicallee wrote: post #303
Natanael_L wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMHO it could be useful if the repetition was greyed out. It would allow you to either read it directly (if your eyesight allows), or quickly trace the line to the text in black and read the name while being able to easily see what direction the street goes

Humans are fantastic at ignoring noise and concentrating on whatever we want to focus on. While you're reading this very comment do you have any idea how much noise is in your field of vision that you're ignoring? Not just on this screen at the same time (literally megabytes of other bitmaps besides my words) but the rest of your field of vision. Really look around. This message contains 575 bytes of text embedded in…

Yes yes, I agree but it's also tiring and distracting at the same time.

Re: Apple's New Map

#355

Post by aetherspawn »

I bought a second hand Lexus the other day.

Whilst Apple and Googles map display might be leagues ahead, the voice and visual navigation in the Lexus hybrids or similar feels like it’s easily decades ahead of both Apple and Google. Both in the quality of instruction given, visual cues and even the sound of the voice.

Which really surprised me, because the last place I expected to find the best navigation system I’d ever seen was a little closed system that hasn’t received software updates since the car was built (2013).

Re: Apple's New Map

#356

Post by onemoresoop »

tomaskafka wrote: post #288
TeMPOraL wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sometimes they do. I second this entire complaining thread; Google Maps really bad as a map . It only works well as a search results display and navigation frontend.

That's what Google maps are - they only care about places where you spend dollars (good luck finding eg. kid playgrounds). Here's an app of a company I worked for, that cares about non-shopping use cases: https://windymaps.com/app

I wonder if this done on purpose or ignored for the reasons you just mentioned

Re: Apple's New Map

#357

Post by onemoresoop »

kryptiskt wrote: post #231
aequitas wrote: post #199

Earlier 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…

> (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 a…

How about if you could change the context menu in the settings. If you want dial, check that you want dial in the settings, if never use dial, check off in settings.

Re: Apple's New Map

#358

Post by Digit-Al »

It seems so wasteful to me that all these companies are sending out cars to get streetview images of the same streets. Google, Apple, Microsoft, and god knows who else. All that fuel and other resources wasted doing the same thing over and over again. I know that commercial interests prevent them from sharing their data, but damn is it wasteful.

It seems to me that if they were to pool their resources then not only could they save money and resources, but they could get more comprehensive imagery for less money.

Re: Apple's New Map

#359

Post by dlivingston »

ehsankia wrote: post #160
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…

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 in the sense that utility shouldn't be the only deciding factor in whether or not to add a feature. Apple, of course, cares about aesthetics, and having contrasting - though still minimalist - vectorized topology makes Maps much more pleasing to look at, and therefore to use.

Re: Apple's New Map

#360

Post by crazygringo »

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…

> try to click the street to drop a pin and you got the street name.

But then I'd lose my actual destination which is already pinned! And I don't want to lose that pin because I'm going to need to refer back to it. I'm trying to understand the area around it.

> People don't want to read street names, they want the nearest address to a certain s point.

This is exactly the kind of attitude that winds up sounding to my ears as extremely tone-deaf. No, I don't want the address, I already have the address, I want to see the name of the cross street before the address so I know when to slow down on my bike and start looking at the (much harder to read) building numbers.

This has nothing to do with letting go of old abstractions. And considering the #1 complaint I hear about Maps is always "I can't find the street names", this suggests that the "new UX" you're referring to is just bad UX. Just because there's an old way doesn't mean it's bad.

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