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TomTom’s new mapping platform and ecosystem

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Re: TomTom’s new mapping platform and ecosystem

#451

Post by reitanqild »

manuelabeledo wrote: post #355
reitanqild wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Problem is, for me at least, Google is useless for predictions or recommendations. Search is still better than DDG, but way worse than peak Google. Their recommendations are all over the place despite the fact that I have been logged in permanently in some form or another since GMail where still invite only. No one else except my wife and my parents know more about me (and to be perfectly clear they know different su…

It sounds like you have issues with the search engine, not maps.

It is not just in the search engine, Google Now AI keeps pushing mostly nonsense.

The most annoying thing is they had this nailed. Google Desktop Search had some bonus features like the feed sidebar that automatically predicted what I wanted to read more of based on what I had read before and it was crazy good.

Search used to be amazing and these days I feel it is barely better than DDG.

Re: TomTom’s new mapping platform and ecosystem

#452

Post by ForHackernews »

jstummbillig wrote: post #323
gambiting wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a modern car with a built-in satnav as well as Android Auto support, and yet I still use my TomTom 5000 - it's just better. Definitely better than crappy Google Maps, definitely better than volvo's built-in maps, and it's without any kind of comparison how much better it is than Apple Maps. You get in the car, it auto-selects the destination based on the patterns it learnt(so if you get in at 7am on a workday,…

> It's just better. Definitely better than crappy Google Maps I struggling to see how anything could be "definitely" better than "crappy" Google Maps. To me, GMaps has made navigation about as exciting as using a door knob. It works without fail, and is so incredibly mundane, that the thought of forming a strong opinion about it makes me drowsy.

Do you live in California, USA?

Google Maps is quite terrible in many parts of the world that are not-America. In Europe, it routinely suggests absolutely insane "shorcuts" because it doesn't seem to understand that even though a narrow, winding country lane with stone walls on either side may have a 90 kph speed limit, it would be suicide to actually drive at that speed.

Re: TomTom’s new mapping platform and ecosystem

#453

Post by DaiPlusPlus »

genocidicbunny wrote: post #358
DaiPlusPlus wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree entirely. Heterogenous (I.e. distinctly shaped) physical controls are essential for safe driving without taking one’s eyes off the road. …but that doesn’t mean my last car’s abysmal “Ford MyTouch” or “Ford Sync” or whatever they rebrand it’s as was ever fit-for-purpose. How can a UI that can’t render faster than ~5fps be considered acceptable by the world’s leading carmaker? Where is the pride in their work?

You have a very good and valid point. Incidentally, despite being not a fan of Tesla's UX, I also see a bit of the silver lining in that it at least got people to start talking about it, both via the point you're making (that all other car UX sucks too) and also starting to ask the questions about what makes a good UX rather than a pretty one.

> at least got people to start talking about it

You speak as though this is something new. It isn't. It was the same story back with Apple's iPod's clickwheel-and-drilldown UX. Nothing was stopping Apple's competitors from innovating on their own and potentially making something superior (and I was particularly fond of the contemporaneous UI of MS's PocketPC 2000's Media Player[1]). But they didn't. Instead everyone: Creative, Dell[2], Rio/iRiver, everyone just kept on putting out unusable plastic flash players that took 30 minutes to sync 10 minutes of 32kbps mono MP3 over COM1 or bulky HDD players unusuable to everyone except those people with ponytails who run that strange new "Linux" operating system I've been hearing so much about.

And before that, it was probably Braun vs. Philips.

For noncoherent reasons that I can't string together into a readable paragraph (I wasted over 10 minutes trying to already) I'll just say I think it's inevitable that in any consumer industry there will eventually be only one company with a monopoly on good taste and good design. Also consider how companies will hire people who are already aligned with the company's values, and we know Apple hires people with an eye for design regardless of their role, but Apple's competitors never had an eye for design, so they neve hired people with an eye for design, so they're never able to compete with Apple on the design front. Upstart competitors might be formed with an objective to wrest-away Apple's monopoly on good design but (post-1997) how could any design-focused small-fry compete with Apple on design? They can't. They'd ever get bought-out before they become too big to become a threat (if Apple's feeling nice), or end-up as another also-ran Android vendor with a nice handset, but you're still stuck with Google, and without the leverage of Samsung.

I don't know where I'm going with this post now, so I'll just end it here.

[1] Rightmost screenshot: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/KMKZKDjJzWY/maxresdefault.jpg

[2] https://daringfireball.net/2005/09/ditty

Re: TomTom’s new mapping platform and ecosystem

#454

Post by mrjin »

Had very bad impression with TomTom. Needed a car navigator badly but the Go-6200 never made it on time thus had to go with Go-6100. It was slow initially, but more or less enough, the cellular data was only good for real time traffic update. But in less than 2 years that was gone too coz TomTom decided to use a 2G module when 4G was everywhere and there was already a time table to retire 2G. That was just genius.

Put all that aside, the battery went bad just around a year, it becomes even slower after each firmware upgrade. But what really p*ssed me off was their explanation to lifetime map updates.

What they do need is really someone with better vision and ethics I would say.

Re: TomTom’s new mapping platform and ecosystem

#455

Post by lukeqsee »

solarkraft wrote: post #430
lukeqsee wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I doubt what I saw will really add to what Doctor_Fegg says in his talk. However, a few examples: https://daylightmap.org is built by Meta (Facebook) to allow their maps to meet their quality needs consistently while still pulling and encouraging OSM updates. This unlocks OSM data for a large amount of sensitive corporations. I personally have made quite a few edits on behalf of customers who pointed out errors in th…

> Some of these contributions may have intentional and unintentional edits that are incompatible with our use cases. Our mapping teams work to scrub these contributions for consistency and quality. In the course of this work, we also build additional tools and technologies on top of OSM to increase mapping speed, and more importantly, drive a higher level of detail, quality and accuracy on the map. So it's like OSM "…

That's not a bad one-word description. :)

Re: TomTom’s new mapping platform and ecosystem

#456

Post by nottorp »

jstummbillig wrote: post #323
gambiting wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a modern car with a built-in satnav as well as Android Auto support, and yet I still use my TomTom 5000 - it's just better. Definitely better than crappy Google Maps, definitely better than volvo's built-in maps, and it's without any kind of comparison how much better it is than Apple Maps. You get in the car, it auto-selects the destination based on the patterns it learnt(so if you get in at 7am on a workday,…

> It's just better. Definitely better than crappy Google Maps I struggling to see how anything could be "definitely" better than "crappy" Google Maps. To me, GMaps has made navigation about as exciting as using a door knob. It works without fail, and is so incredibly mundane, that the thought of forming a strong opinion about it makes me drowsy.

YMMV. Google sent me to shortcuts that couldn't be called roads at least 3 times since i've been using it.

They also have a tendency to make you stick to the main - congested - roads. You won't notice unless you're a local to the area though, so let's say that's good enough.

Waze in my experience seems to have more realistic ETAs and is better at routing around traffic jams. Even though it's built on Google Maps.

However I'm in Romania and I do long weekends in mountain retreats in the middle of nowhere. As I said, YMMV.

Re: TomTom’s new mapping platform and ecosystem

#457

Post by franga2000 »

kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #393
ipsum2 wrote: post #388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Abusive means "extremely offensive and insulting", according to Google

Only if you're part of the entitlement generation that expects everything to be free and nobody should be paid for their work.

If it was about wanting everything to be free, Mapbox wouldn't be the most common non-Google map provider. Google's free tier is more generous and their data is usually better. A few points that particularly bother me:

1. Google gets a lot of this data from their users (both from traditional crowdsourcing and sneaky things like tracking Android phones) and then locks it up so you have to pay to use it.

2. The way they license their services forces you to stay in their ecosystem. For example you are only allowed to use Google Places Search on a Google Maps map.

3. There are APIs Google just doesn't provide for various reasons and because they "own" the data, everyone else has to start from scratch (or use OSM). There's no way to download some subset of the data for a one-time sum or even a subscription license and provide your own service on top of it.

Yes, these things mostly fall into what people consider a company's freedom to do business however they like. But Google is more than just any random company and the data they gatekeep is more than just any random dataset.

Re: TomTom’s new mapping platform and ecosystem

#458

Post by msh »

caf wrote: post #432
msh wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

apple maps do the same and also works quite well. I miss it in my tesla.

The Tesla maps do it too, when you tap on the navigation address entry there's a list of 'Suggested' which is learned based on time of day / day of week.

Thanks. Then I learned something new today.

Re: TomTom’s new mapping platform and ecosystem

#459

Post by neutronicus »

reitanuki wrote: post #81
reaperducer wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You assume that one knows that the place where you're going is beyond the reach of cellular service before one even goes there.

With apps like OsmAnd and Organic Maps, I can download the map for the entire country and navigate off it. Highly recommended — both on F-Droid.

Can OsmAnd actually calculate routes?

I like having OSM sometimes for, like, figuring out parking and trails in parks, but I've never succeeded using it to get directions on roads.

Re: TomTom’s new mapping platform and ecosystem

#460

Post by lm28469 »

jstummbillig wrote: post #323
gambiting wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a modern car with a built-in satnav as well as Android Auto support, and yet I still use my TomTom 5000 - it's just better. Definitely better than crappy Google Maps, definitely better than volvo's built-in maps, and it's without any kind of comparison how much better it is than Apple Maps. You get in the car, it auto-selects the destination based on the patterns it learnt(so if you get in at 7am on a workday,…

> It's just better. Definitely better than crappy Google Maps I struggling to see how anything could be "definitely" better than "crappy" Google Maps. To me, GMaps has made navigation about as exciting as using a door knob. It works without fail, and is so incredibly mundane, that the thought of forming a strong opinion about it makes me drowsy.

It really depends on where you live and what you do.

One time it wanted me to walk through the waste/sewer pipes of Mallorca to go from a beach to the city center, let me tell you it's not a pedestrian path.

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