71–80 of 157 posts
This is ridiculous in the year 2012. Nothing about this should be a headache (apart from people keeping their data secret for various reasons) yet it's still bafflingly hard.
Maps is the only example that I can think of when compared head to head, Google makes better software. I hope people will continue to complain because it will force apple to get their shit together and put out a better product. Myapple maps experience is north compared with my Google maps , however, I haven't had any notable issues with apple amps in the Baltimore area.
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This is the first event that people will put down to a lack of Steve Jobs that I think actually might reflect that...
the decision to switch to there own maps was made while jobs was around. its also not the first time apple replaces a product with an inferior option and insists its better, final cut pro x comes to mind.
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Is this true though? It's easy for everyone for all the armchair CEOs to say that Jobs never would have released such an epic fail, but I'm not so sure. If there's one thing that Apple hates as much as a half-baked UX, it's dependency on another tech company. It seems pretty obvious to me as a casual developer and observer of Google maps over the years that global mapping is really really hard. How could Apple not ha…
Are Bing Maps this horrible? Couldn't they license those if they didn't have a choice? Or what about MapQuest? What about the maps used by GPS units? Couldn't they have made a deal with Garmin or Tomtom or someone like that? It may have taken more work than integration with Google, but it'd almost definitely take less work than starting from scratch. I definitely do not believe that their hands were tied and they wer…
(And I know that for all its faults, Nokia is smart enough to apply human QA to their mapping system, because in my last job I worked on the Web site that those human contractors used.)
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1) Many other companies have succeeded at getting social to work: Ping did not; do you use Ping? I explicitly go into the story with regards to Ping. I know of no one who considers Ping a success. http://www.powayiliad.com/2011/01/itunes-ping-an-apple-failu... http://www.buzzfeed.com/scott/ping-fail-5-reasons-to-avoid-j... Even Apple considers Ping a failure, so I'm really not certain where you are trying to go with…
1) Which companies succeeded at "getting social to work?" Facebook? 2) Okay. I've tried to buy large numbers of servers from Apple in the past. They really aren't server people, it's true. I was trying to buy these servers because I was working for a company whose primary business is searching through petabytes of data. Apple was and still is kicking the shit out of everyone with Spotlight. 3) I'm not saying there ha…
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/07/18/left-itunes-for-spo...
4) I currently host jailbreakme.com, but comex developed that specific jailbreak. I helped with Corona (5.1 exploit) and run Cydia, Substrate, etc.; I guess thinking about it more, I produced the protection fix for one of comex's JailbreakMe PDF exploits (making me somewhat relevantly related to that project).
Apple does not, in fact, have a good reputation when it comes to malicious code: they are simply sufficiently small players that people don't target them. A lot of people believe otherwise, but as far as I can tell this is because their knowledge of Apple products comes only from Apple's marketing efforts.
In fact, in 2010, reknowned security researcher Charlie Miller (who was winning Pwn2Own every year until he decided to stop attending to protest a rules change) was fuzzing PDF renderers, and found many more exploitable PDF files against Apple's Preview (30-60 failures) than in Adobe's Acrobate (only 3-10).
^ This, combined with first-hand experience with the zero-day PDF exploits from comex (where the second exploit was to the same mechanism as the first, as Apple apparently failed to fix it the first time around) are the reason I install Adobe Acrobat and deactivate Preview on my Mac: at least Adobe manages to fix the bugs that are found.
5) iOS 6 was not released in May. In fact, no iOS version was released concurrent to that reported issue, AFAIK. How is this relevant to the example I dragged up and posted? I specifically went out of my way to find an example that would not fall to simple "but the bandwidth is too much for Apple/Akamai to handle!" arguments, and you didn't even pay attention.
The article does not really provide much new information. That mapping is hard is known. That there are companies who have much experience in this area and that Apple will have to compete with them is known - from Google, over Garmin to Nokia. It's just that it is hard and that it will take Apple a lot of time and investment to bring the mapping functionality to a better level. I'm pretty sure Apple knows that. It's…
The first iPod didn't do a lot, but what it did, it did correctly. If the first iPod had had the scale of quality issues we're seeing out of Apple Maps, there wouldn't have been a second.
Nobody, including Google, consistently delivers functional map data to mobile devices every time, at least not in the Atlanta metro area. I travel there with some frequency for various soccer tournaments as a referee or parent. It is not uncommon for one or another device to provide faulty routing to the people involved in a match. Sometimes it's Garmin. Sometimes it's Android. sometimes Bing.
People don't primarily buy smartphones for the maps any more than people primarily buy smartphones based on call quality. Apple knows this. Apple sells phones because of iTunes and brand positioning.
The issues with maps didn't even garner a comment among the Apple fans in yesterday's Facebook feed. The edge cases among iPhone users that will be lost over poor quality maps is more than offset by the Genius's sales pitch about how easy Apple's map application is to use.
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Would Jobs have the balls to release iOS 6 with no Maps at all for a year or more while they scramble to catch up? Those would be some huge cajones.
Jobs didn't exactly lack "cajones" but there were other approaches than just "no maps at all" - try to make the deal with Google happen; Apple has so much money it's hard to understand why they couldn't buy their way into Google Maps for another year or two - make a deal with someone else (Microsoft / Bing Maps, other map provider) while still working on their own, in-house solution It's great that Apple decided to b…
Excellent post, full of valuable insight. Apple lacks the ability to mine vast amounts of local search data, as Google was able to do when it started its mapping project. Does anybody know what this means? Don't the queries I make go through their servers, and isn't my location a relevant parameter for those queries? I don't see why this can't be mined.
Having a lot of relevant questions (and hard data on which answers to those questions were used) is an invaluable resource in bootstrapping mapping and local search together.