Goes to show, when you want a job done right, you often end up having to do it yourself.
Should this be a map or 500 maps?
81–90 of 115 posts
Re: Should this be a map or 500 maps?
#82Goes to show, if you want a job done right, you often end up having to do it yourself.
Re: Should this be a map or 500 maps?
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
Install Maps Go for another map, and set up a Work Profile for 2 more maps. Or use Maps in abBrowser. Interestingly, when you have public transit navigation running, Maps is able to run "current trip" in background while you plan an alternate/additional trip.
Yes. Then buy another phone for up to 4 extra maps. At this point paper maps start looking more useful than digital ones. Google Maps is not a map. It's a half-decent nav system slash ad delivery vector, that pretends to be a map, but sucks at it.
Huh? Google Maps is a map.
If you don't use it for directions, then that's entirely what it is.
Sure there are a few icons for sponsored businesses, but that's all. They're easy to ignore.
The way you can pan and zoom, it's 1000x more useful than any of the road atlases I used to have to keep in my car. Looking up an address is instant rather than taking a couple of minutes on a paper atlas, and it's simple to pan and zoom the route you want to plan, without having to jump from page 30 to page 65 when you go north and try to re-locate the road you're trying to follow.
It's much more than a map, but it's crazy to say it isn't a map. Along with Apple Maps and OSM, they're basically the best maps ever made by humankind.
(And you can put down markers too, and then remove them later. Paper maps you can draw on, but erasing is hard/impossible.)
Re: Should this be a map or 500 maps?
#84We had a lively discussion about Google Maps in my cycling group. It's very annoying to have a map that is only designed to show the fastest route, and that forcefully reroutes you to it. It doesn't let you avoid a road or favour another. It does not show named bike routes and hiking trails. It doesn't even let you keep the screen on without having directions. For most people, the entire experience of using a map is…
There's a certain (group of) employees/people in Google maps team which prevent things like this because of their self appointed social justice/we know better ego and they are actually proud of it.
Re: Should this be a map or 500 maps?
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hire some game devs that have worked on path finding in AAA games. They will find a way to partially pre process the map data in such a way that on-device computation can then let the user pick and choose what roads to favor and what roads to exclude. And as an added bonus they’ll be unrelentingly optimizing your map application to the point where the UI will run at 144 Hz ;)
> Hire some game devs that have worked on path finding in AAA games. I think you're seriously overestimating how many AAA games do any kind of fancy pathfinding beyond "just use A*".
Well. I’m not saying to unconditionally hire them.
Ask them a few questions in the interview to see what specific kind of problems they’ve been solving :)
Re: Should this be a map or 500 maps?
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
A crowdsourced map with a collection of "favorite routes" would be an interesting idea, although some people (including me) hate trodding down beaten paths. I suppose these are mostly on websites/specialized apps, eg. for hikers.
Strava has a global heat-map for running, cycling etc. although I believe it is a subscription-only feature. There is also your personal heat-map which is cool to see if you use the app enough.
Not subscription-only, but „ Street-level detail is available only to registered Strava athletes“ on https://www.strava.com/heatmap so you need an account.
Re: Should this be a map or 500 maps?
#87We had a lively discussion about Google Maps in my cycling group. It's very annoying to have a map that is only designed to show the fastest route, and that forcefully reroutes you to it. It doesn't let you avoid a road or favour another. It does not show named bike routes and hiking trails. It doesn't even let you keep the screen on without having directions. For most people, the entire experience of using a map is…
I’m often struck by how poorly Google and Apple Maps work as substitutes for an atlas. They focus on roadways, and while they can show you the physical appearance of terrain, they do a poor job of putting names to both physical features - mountain ranges, rivers, valleys, seas and bays - as well as human names for regions.
Apple Maps tries a little - I can zoom out over the US and occasionally it tries to write ‘Appalachian Mountains’ along the length of the range, for example - but it pops in and out as you zoom and scroll and actually getting a view where the whole name is visible is difficult. Sometimes it labels the ‘Gulf of Maine’. Sometimes it labels it ‘Fox Islands Thouroughfare’.
Google maps as you zoom out just keeps showing the road networks with no hierarchy of importance (the interstate network doesn’t stand out from the dense grid at all) and at some level just labels states and countries. It has. Interest in labeling large scale geographical features at all.
Try picking out a good view on one of these maps that lets you trace the course of the Mississippi River and pick out the major cities along the route. It’s just not something you can accomplish with these maps.
Re: Should this be a map or 500 maps?
#88We had a lively discussion about Google Maps in my cycling group. It's very annoying to have a map that is only designed to show the fastest route, and that forcefully reroutes you to it. It doesn't let you avoid a road or favour another. It does not show named bike routes and hiking trails. It doesn't even let you keep the screen on without having directions. For most people, the entire experience of using a map is…
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Re: Should this be a map or 500 maps?
#89> I don't want this to be mistaken for a story about web design. If you squint, you will find the same set of tradeoffs in all manner of creative work and systems thinking Lots of comments about literal maps and then web design. This generalization of the idea quoted above made me think of something I believe about technological convergence (putting everything into phones and tablets). We’re losing the way custom mad…
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Re: Should this be a map or 500 maps?
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
>walking in new cities I do enjoy digital life, but you know what else rocks, apropos walking in new cities[0]? Custom maps, printed. Its fun to look at the little piles of maps I've made for myself over the years, from Frome to Rome, Berlin to Pristine .. In fact, I think I prefer printed maps over digital, for personal adventure/navigation needs. ([0] Disclaimer: Got navionics and predict wind running on multiple t…
What do you mean by custom maps? What do you include/exclude from them, and how do you make them?
I use tools such as Google Maps and Open Street Maps, and I cut/paste, mostly just by eyeball, with the relevant things I might be interested in - the train stations of Rome, for example, and so on. Google Earth is also great for this, but I confess that the last one I made for myself (Berlin), I just screengrabbed and pasted my friends # in place, with the train details, etc.
There's something comforting about knowing how to get around when the power goes out. Since I enjoy roaming adventures requiring navigation, making little maps for myself is basically just how I roll .. got me where I needed to be.