71–80 of 201 posts
He poses the question of which map you'd want when lost. A mobile phone with Google Maps is clearly the right answer.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not only zooming, Google Maps also has search. If you're looking for Oakland, CA, you go to the search bar and type "Oakland, CA", and it shows up on the map. No need to scan the map for the thing you're looking for, that's the computer's job!
Search is of course entirely useless, worse than useless, if you don't know in advance what you are looking for. Needless to say, search is not an adequate substitute for intelligent design and proper levels of detail on maps.
Google know more than the author about how Google Maps is used by end users. The author is grading Google Maps based on the number of cities and roads displayed, not how the users use it. Google provide an alternative mapping product, Google Earth, for satisfying curiosity about the planet. Google maps is primarily a navigation tool. They have very distinct use cases.
There's a broad trend of tech companies disrupting traditional industries and then making rookie mistakes and generally not living up to the standards of the tradition. Google, hire cartographers. Amazon, hire librarians and typesetters. Spotify, hire musicologists.
I.e. when you look at a Google map it is using the latest GIS data to construct a “good” representation for your screen resolution using your specified zoom factor and possibly even with dynamic overlays or highlights.
Likewise, when you read an e-book you can read it on many different display sizes, pick your own font, and font size. So where we used to have the book typeset once by a person, it is now done on-the-fly using user and device specific parameters.
The result won’t be as good as when you have a human do it, and even when a human does it, there might be limitations in the e-book markup language, just like with HTML.
I'm surprised the author didn't mention the main difference between paper maps and google maps. That is, google maps is interactive. With a paper map what you see is what you get. You had to cram as much information as it would allow. But this is not the case with google maps. You can zoom in, out, and anywhere in between. You can't compare the two based on the level of information displayed at one fixed zoom level b…
You can't zoom out if the information is only showed on a tight zoom. You need to keep zooming in and out.
Here's an example of how tight the zoom has to be to get eg bus stops to show up. For this example the user has to zoom in really close to get the bus stop shown, then either very careful start zooming out while keeping an eye on where their bus stop was OR keep panning.
I'm surprised the author didn't mention the main difference between paper maps and google maps. That is, google maps is interactive. With a paper map what you see is what you get. You had to cram as much information as it would allow. But this is not the case with google maps. You can zoom in, out, and anywhere in between. You can't compare the two based on the level of information displayed at one fixed zoom level b…
So, if you plan a route, do the maps change depending on your destination?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
For driving Google Maps getting quite bad. See this screenshoot: http://imgur.com/uPO8QJh This kind of crowded display is fairly common now. I use Here Maps now which is much better + I like supporting a second option to avoid one service getting 2 monopolistic. My theory of why google maps is getting worse is there must be designers dedicated to this that need to constantly look for 'new' things to add even if its t…
There are also one too many buttons when you choose a route. If I want to drive, then I type in the address, select it, press a button to activate it, then press a similar button to start the route. Why is that last button needed?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not only zooming, Google Maps also has search. If you're looking for Oakland, CA, you go to the search bar and type "Oakland, CA", and it shows up on the map. No need to scan the map for the thing you're looking for, that's the computer's job!
On a phone, scanning can be much faster and more pleasant than typing.
"Ok Google, show me a map of Oakland, California."
There's a broad trend of tech companies disrupting traditional industries and then making rookie mistakes and generally not living up to the standards of the tradition. Google, hire cartographers. Amazon, hire librarians and typesetters. Spotify, hire musicologists.
Isn’t it more a problem of having algorithms do what used to be done by humans? I.e. when you look at a Google map it is using the latest GIS data to construct a “good” representation for your screen resolution using your specified zoom factor and possibly even with dynamic overlays or highlights. Likewise, when you read an e-book you can read it on many different display sizes, pick your own font, and font size. So…
The "Google, where did I leave my keys?" joke is getting closer to feature status, and that's probably what's going on with Google Maps. Anecdatum: last month I was driving out for a weekend in some rural bungalows a few miles outside a small city (Elvas, Portugal). The address was a bit vague, the place name too common, so much so that I had GPS coords stowed away in a message pic (don't ask ;-). So, when I pop out…