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 frustrating when Apple and Google show a highway shield instead of a street name in an urban area. Yes, lots of streets in urban areas are also state highways. But the state highway designations only appear in real life every few miles, while the street signs I'm standing under appear on every corner.
But the greatest sin is omission. Each month I have to render about 70,000 maps from towns and cities from the Philippines to Nova Scotia. And every month I spend three days manually placing towns and businesses that exist in no online maps.
And it's not just tiny towns on far away islands. I'm talking about places in Oklahoma and Arizona and even California that either don't exist, or are stupendously wrong.
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.
>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 challenge would be managing the partnership between the map customers like google and apple..
If anyone wants to fund this and/or has the connections to play sales/product manager, DM me.. :p
Last year's article from the same author [1] about Goggle Maps' use of photogrammetry and other building scanning techiques was, in my opinion, one of the most interesting HN submissions ever (its comment section[2] is also worth a read).
He's written multiple articles about maps, even before that one: https://www.justinobeirne.com. He's very good at spotting details in maps–IIRC he worked on Apple's maps team before, so this isn't particularly surprising.
This is really neat but I don't really care about greenery when I'm using Apple Maps. Can they take a break from figuring out how to convert satellite images into green blobs and devise an algorithm to put street names on the screen?
Apple and Google maps are both worthless as maps without typing in an actual address and using navigation because they can't just show the main cross street names on the screen. It absolutely blows my mind that map products ship without street names clearly visible at all times.
The before/after map of downtown SF actually shows less useful data about the city. It no longer shows the names of Mission or Market streets. The fancy 3D representations of buildings don't help me negotiate on the ground.
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 the time I've zoomed and panned enough to find whatever random faraway place manages to have a label (feels like an unwanted game of whack-a-mole, where will the label pop up??), I can't tell if I've zoomed over to a parallel street instead.
And the solution is so simple too: whenever you zoom in enough that there's enough room on a visible street to put a label, then put the label! I mean if I zoom in so far that only the one street is visible and there's no other text on it, but Maps still leaves it blank... it just feels inexcusable.
"AVs navigate themselves—so all we’ll really need to know is where we want to go. And Google, with a rapidly-growing autonomy project of its own, seems to have caught on to this.
"If you zoom out on Google Maps’s recent features, you’ll notice that they’re increasingly about figuring out “where to go?”
"And even Google’s map seems to be following this pattern. Over the last two years, Google has gradually been turning it inside out, from a road map to a place map.
"Is Google future-proofing itself against a not-too-distant world that has little need for driving directions? Whether or not that’s true, it does seem as if place information might be even more important tomorrow than it is today."
Let’s also not forget that there are regions/countries where it’s either culturally not always the norm to use street names while giving directions (especially when driving), where in the real world a street name is hard/impossible to find on a sign (try to find and read a small low-contrast stone inlay somewhere up on a building while you drive luckily slowly), or where street names don’t even exist!
When driving in some countries in Europe a GPS will repeat that you should use <really long badly pronounced street names after an old white guy> for multiple steps when in fact the road signs don’t mention the street anywhere and just say “Center”. (Granted sometimes the GPS directions are correct and use signage info.) Or the street name may have changed 5 times, as you keep driving straight on the same road.
The problem, as with all things in maps, isn’t so clear-cut and the fixation on street names is very centric to certain countries.
Agreed; and, the greenery information is useless without also a way to determine ownership or transit privileges. Is it private, public (district, state, federal), military, or some other kind of ownership class?
I find it hard to believe that so much work could go into maps when actually using it doesn't seem to be the main goal. How am I going to use this greenery information?
Sometimes I just can't type name in local language correctly but I know the street name where it is and yet I can't find it by looking at the map without extreme zoom in. Searching the street name seems to give a completely random point.
I end up zooming to random streets where I think mine should be over and over until I find my street - what a ridiculous process.
There's so much empty space - this obsession with form over function has to stop.
I've switched to one of openstreetmaps clients for this reason alone. They're not afraid of showing actual information.
Yeah, Google maps way back in the day was a lot better at this. (Waaay back in the day, when the use-case was, "print out the directions to take with you in the car".)
I just don't think it's a priority anymore -- they want the map to "look pretty" and people to use turn-by-turn nav.
The funny thing is that while you are driving along a route, Apple Maps is actually pretty good at giving you exactly the info you need on cross streets, calling them out well ahead of time even when you don't need to make a turn there.
So to some extent Apple's designers and developers know the value of understand what streets are around, but that knowledge isn't evenly distributed/applied.
Keep in mind that many people cannot read a map. At least in the sense of navigating by it. I forget the proportion, but every time someone does a study, it's disheartening. Perhaps Google has done some usability testing and is catering to the "normal" person.
This reminds me of all the complaints about Apple's Touch Bar, saying there aren't affordances for touch typing.
Maps and directions should be separate programs, they fulfill different needs. In a more open-access world, you could build them both on top of the same data (I assume you can with open street map).
These maps are useful when someone or something else send or share you the specific coordinates to a destination, but useless when navigating and looking for a place you don't know. These maps are useless for the question _Where I am now?_
FWIW, I have the same complaint about OsmAnd on Android. I can zoom right in to a street, so I there's essentially nothing else on the screen, and it will still only show me the name occasionally.
This. I can not tell you how much I miss having those Street Names appearing in every street when driving through SF Downtown. I had to distract myself from driving and start pinch-zooming in hope to somehow see the street names with worthless efforts. And I am using Google Maps on my Android phone. This should definitely be fixed especially in crowded city Downtowns like Oakland and SF.
After taking a look at SF, it seems to me that there really isn't enough space for additional street names without losing something else. So I believe your complaint is more about the prioritisation among streets, or of streets vs. other entities?
The first would seem valid, if Mission St is, as I gather, rather important. FWIW: after searching for Mission District, the street is now visible far more often. It's labeled even at a zoom level where the water on the east and west are comfortably within the frame.
The decision of de-emphasising street names for the benefit of landmarks/museums/event locations etc. is rather subjective: I often use Maps for purposes other than directions, such as getting a feel for an apartment's neighbourhood, finding restaurants, exploring places in the news, or that appeared in books or movies, or even just "sightseeing".
For all these purposes, the style of Google and Apple Maps is obviously far better than traditional folding maps.
You seem to do direction planning the "old-school" way of manually planning a path from A to B. But that mode has been somewhat deprecated, because typing an address and getting a specific route happens to be far better for this purpose. It's not so much decreasing skills in map reading the luddites so often bemoan: In unfamiliar locations, Google has so much more information, such as both typical and real-time traffic, specific expected times to negotiate every intersection, up-to-date road closures etc. Plus a slightly better shortest path algorithm than eyeballing it.
To get back to shrubbery: I rather shrug. Because you're right that it's less important than roads. But by its nature as just the background colour, I believe it does not actually compete with street labels, at least not in the way that other labels do.
And the competitor isn't much better for map browsing without navigation. I've noticed now on Google Maps that some businesses just won't show up on the map, even at maximum zoom.
Google knows they're there because they do show up in a search, but that doesn't work if you don't remember the name. I saw a restaurant while walking, went to look it up later, knew it was somewhere on a particular street, and had to resort to Street View to find it. Luckily the last Street View picture was from just after the restaurant first opened.
Presumably these businesses haven't ever paid for advertising.
Apple Maps is no better in my area. It has a few popular places and one shop that was demolished in 2002.
Agreed. At the very least, when you pull up directions, every road that you have to turn on should have the street name should be visible (at least without too much zooming).
> because they can't just show the main cross street names on the screen. It absolutely blows my mind that map products ship without street names clearly visible at all times.
Really. It seems they actually put some effort into showing the names of most streets except the one you're interested in. No, really.
It's amazing how often this happens, because it's almost mind reading at this point.
Just playing devil's advocate here but why would you need to use a map, if not for directions or locating a specific thing? Are you just trying to check out what roads are around? In Apple Maps, if you switch to walking view, you get a closer view with the road names. In driving mode, it makes sense to me that those would be less useful unless I'm navigating.
On iOS there's a clunky workaround. Drop a pin on the street with no name and the pin info tells you the name. Of course you probably don't want a pin, so scroll down and hit the trash can.
What would be awesome is if the UI didn't assume I wanted to drop a pin when I'm pointing at a spot on the map - it could popup the info with an option to add a pin, or just touch away to not do that.
The original Google Maps showed all the street names on all the streets, so you didn't have to guess.
Later versions of Google Maps didn't do this, so on some streets, you would have no idea what the street names were, and would have to zoom out or scroll out until you saw the name.
THIS is what I want fixed. I don't care about vegetation, I want to be able to see what the street names are without distracting myself on the map.
Yup. If they want to win the "prettiest most useless map software" award, then congratulations Apple (and Google lately too).
It's a disturbing trend in tech in general. Looks over function. Everything from websites to apps to actual physical products, design is more important than functionality.
The original Google Maps was pre-rendered in a gigantic MapReduce. It had many fewer landmarks.
The modern Google Maps does a lot of the layout and rendering on the client or on the fly, with a differing set of constraints and tradeoffs. It also has many more landmarks.
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 boundaries of a national forest is extremely useful.
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.
Also weird that in the very first picture they added a blue lake (next to Pyramid Lake) that is currently and has been dry for a while... I guess they're betting on rain?
For some reason the national forest boundaries on google map seem to be frequently wrong and also change over time (at least I've noticed some changes). Trinity (CA) looks to be completely missing, as is a large portion of Gifford Pinchot or Okanogan-Wenatchee and maybe Snoqualmie (WA). Not sure why this happens.
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. Yes Apple is backing privacy which is fine but they shouldn’t say they can offer equal or better features and also pursuing the privacy strategy. POI and Yelp has been the major issue with Apple Maps and this review shows they aren’t changing in this regard so now we have better vegetation but same POI issues. Very disappointing.
> That is the only have part of one state and will be many years until the whole country [...]
*whole world. Apple maps users are not just in the US.
I think your concerns might be overstated though. Hopefully they've just decided to heavily focus on this area up to now to tune their algorithms etc. and will be able to roll it out much more quickly from here on out.
POIs definitely need to be much improved but there seems to be some very solid street data updates with this.
I used to live in the Cayman Islands (Grand Cayman specifically), and my issue with Apple Maps is, forget about the enhanced details being mentioned in this article, the actual landmass on the map is WRONG, and I just checked - its still wrong. Roads and roundabouts and my condo, and Camana Bay (big mixed commercial living area) apparently in the ocean. Its been like this since they introduced it.
Here's a side by side of West Bay, Seven Mile Beach and Boddentown, between Apple Maps on the left and Google Maps on the right.
I understand that its not a huge market (even though there's something like 2 million+ cruise shippers stopping every year), but man... it really makes me not trust it anywhere when the map is completely wrong, geographically speaking
The new maps data is covering only Southern California now and according to Apple is gonna be covering all of the mainland US in the following year. So for the rest of us in the remaining parts of the world, it will be a long time before we see any updated maps.
I wonder how this happens. If Apple has the capacity to detect grass strips between roads, how do they misplace an entire part of town (into the ocean, no less). Isn't there some sort of process in place to detect false positives?
I cannot fail to notice how many # of ads, notifications, various asks, pop-ups, disclaimers, endorsements, contact buttons or share buttons there are on this page compared to what we see in any other piece of content with as much detailed information.
The author definitely enjoys compiling these amazing essays and share this knowledge.
> And the office’s large headcount (now near 5,000) suggests some sort of manual / labor-intensive process.
My partner briefly worked for a human-powered 3d mapping firm; they would get satellite and plane/drone photography of a large swath of land, split it up into block-sized chunks, and then each worker would take a block and use an in-house program to model the buildings at a pretty impressive level of detail. Workers got paid per-block and blocks were priced based on their complexity. They've been doing this for over 10 years by this point, so it's not an entirely unknown or uncommon thing to handle this kind of work manually.
Is this even sustainable in a "World" Scale? Because at this rate I don't see this brings Apple to cover all the major cities of world in 10 years time, let alone majority of lands which aren't in these locations.
That's your use case. I've used maps a lot to try to find hidden or secluded parks -- often with great success.
I'm talking postcard-perfect views around the Sydney harbor, small beaches around various bays, isolated parks near beautiful rivers and a whole lot of other places that are really beautiful and probably only known to the locals. Lots of these places were a brisk walk away from high-traffic areas too.
This is not to dismiss your question on the directions, though, which is certainly an important part of using maps on a phone.
In the area Apple's new maps are in, in my experience (important to underline that): yes, they do. I've been using these new maps since they appeared in the iOS 12 beta, so close to half a year, and they're pretty good. And, yes, to a comment you made below this one, Apple Maps is getting good at handling traffic. I find them equal to Google, although not as good as Waze. (Yes, I know Google owns Waze, but I'm standing by this. Waze does better than Google Maps here.)
As the linked blog post shows, they're definitely not perfect; I haven't encountered anything particularly egregious, but the fun thing about maps is that virtually everyone will run into what are ostensibly "edge cases" eventually. Apple Maps has steered me wrong before, but so has Google and Waze. (Waze has gotten much better at destinations in the last few years, after their purchase by Google, although they still have a disquieting penchant for "shortcut" directions that include "make this uncontrolled left turn across three lanes of traffic." Not only does Apple rarely do that, Google rarely does that.)
It depends greatly on use case. When I’m hiking somewhere “in the country”, it’s of tremendous help to see every tree (and even what type) and shed on a map as it helps me with orientation.
I don't know if it has been updated since, but literally two months ago it could not get you from Custer State Park to Mount Rushmore. It frequently asked me to go in the complete wrong direction. I can't trust it when it can't connect two popular areas that are relatively nearby.
That said, it was fine for anything that was on major highways.
I find vegetation massively helpful, because I have a pretty good idea of the shape of the forest areas around my city (both from driving around and also from looking at satellite/aerial photos). I can actually find a lot of places faster looking at the shape of the forest, parks, etc. than by either looking at the streets or even searching!
It's just making the map data match the real world better, and making it useful for more than just driving.
>In other words, TomTom’s database somehow has roads from Parkfield’s boomtown days—roads that have been gone for more than 75 years. No wonder why Apple removed them.
Another possible explanation is the TomTom was using these unlikely to be visited streets as trap streets.
>In cartography, a trap street is a fictitious entry in the form of a misrepresented street on a map, often outside the area the map nominally covers, for the purpose of "trapping" potential copyright violators of the map who, if caught, would be unable to explain the inclusion of the "trap street" on their map as innocent. On maps that are not of streets, other "copyright trap" features may be inserted or altered for the same purpose.
Using streets from maps that predate TomTom’s maps defeats the purpose of a trap street. The plagiariser could just claim to have sourced the data from old, public domain, sources.
Before Apple Maps added transit mode and hand-edited all the stops, it was displaying half the Caltrain stations as "Southern Pacific". The data sources are more than happy to give you data from 1940.
Funny that the author mentions the Markleeville Courthouse as being across the street from the General Store, when it is, in fact, next door, as shown in the picture. I'm sure plenty of us on HN have cycled through Markleeville a couple of times in mid-July...
I've always found Google vs Apple maps discussions to be interesting, as I've always vastly preferred Apple Maps data for walking around places; Google Maps too often had poor building shapes that looked nothing like the real thing, or hid business names at the scale I was trying to use. Perhaps that's because I live in the Bay Area. When I'm overseas, in particular, I don't hesitate to go to Google Maps first.
Hilarious that they consider the job done after covering the Bay area. They are years away from doing this world wide. Most of their iphone revenue is from outside of California.
I used to work in Nokia in the maps division that later became Here. I still remember when Nokia disrupted a market then dominated by the likes Tom Tom and a few others by giving away the maps for free along with every phone. Initially this was a subscription service that you had to opt into. But releasing it for free changed a lot of things.
One of those things was Google accelerating their own maps production and terminating their licensing of Nokia's Navteq maps. It took them many years after that to catch up in terms of quality after that. They had to rely on Teleatlas (now Tom Tom) for quite some time while slowly building out their maps. This is a huge investment and a lot of work. I'd say they definitely pulled ahead only a few years ago with very decent world wide coverage for most of their feature set. Here maps is still better qualitatively in some areas but their feature set is just not great at this point and they've lost most of the consumer mind share they used to have under Nokia. They are still unrivaled for offline navigation on the road and they completely own the in car navigation market at this point (around 70-80% marketshare).
Apple maps inception was around 2011ish around the time their relationship with Google soured. Actually several of my former colleagues ended up working for them after the Nokia implosion. They prematurely launched the first version and they are still heavily dependent on Tom Tom's Teleatlas (again) after last year's revision which improved things considerably. The stuff in this article is nice but world coverage like this is quite far out. Also, you can bet Google will take the hint and get their hands dirty improving their algorithms. The genius with their operation is that they are really good at collecting data, so new algorithms can be applied world wide. This is where Apple is behind: they lack the data coverage that Google has been investing in for the last decade.
I would say map quality for someone living outside of the "bubble", map quality goes as follows:
TomTom then Google Maps then literally anything else, then Apple Maps at the very end. It's hilarious how empty Apple Maps are, and considering that until very recently they were the only option for Apple CarPlay for navigation, that was extremely bad. Seriously, it was so bad that I would consider my car's built-in, shitty 5-year old sat nav system over using Apple Maps, it's that bad. Google Maps is still lacking in many many aspects(it has no idea which streets are one way, has no idea about no-left/right turn signs, it still connects roads on the map which are not connected in reality, its database of POI is lackluster at best - TomTom doesn't seem to have any of those issues), but god, Apple Maps outside of US is just bad.
To take issue with your premise… What indicates to you that they consider the job “done”? Every note/article around this has indicated that they consider the job started, but nowhere near done; they're just rolling the data out as it is ready enough (clearly “ready” is… Subjective here heh).
The first couple paragraphs and images led me to believe that the article was satire, and was explaining that everything in Apple Maps was gone except for an extremely detailed map of California. Then I started wondering if it wasn't satire.
It's niche, but I could see this feature being useful to me. This is relevant when using maps to scout outdoor locations for whatever activity it is. I use maps to find public bodies of water to go fishing along the lake shore. Getting an idea of the vegetation around a lake before zooming in and looking at the satellite data (which is mentally tiring to me) is very nice. I find myself preferring Apple's Maps app to the Google Maps app on iOS even if Google has better maps in its app anyway, so I really welcome these improvements.
It's a long read end to end, but I found that the author is consistently level-headed in his criticisms and praise. I do not think he was being sarcastic.
Lol, he's comparing the two worst map distributors details, and comparing its various mapping mistakes. I didn't see a word about the two other better maps: Microsoft and OpenStreetMap.
Why Microsoft? They collaborated very early with a very good mapping university institute, which invented creating 3d data from stereo images, from air photos and car-level photos (for the facades), and so on, and then offered the city and regional surveyor officed cooperation contracts. they usually gave the best GIS data of all.
A few years later Google came into this business by getting the rights for US satellite data, but with satellite data you are always behind. no 3d extraction possible and always 4 years behind. local airplane stereo photos are done yearly to find illegal buildings and collect taxes for them. they are done by the state and cities.
OpenStreetMap is crowdfunded so the level of detail is unmatched of course.
I coded such 3d extraction from stereo photos in the late 80ies for our local city land surveyor office. the roof details and height was much better then than today's public data in Google or Apple' maps. feature extraction was half automatic, guided with manual help.
He frequently uses map details as a proxy for looking at techniques and goals. The details themselves are just an end to a means.
If you look at previous articles, he does a good job of analyzing Google’s strategy for the future of maps.
Perhaps he feels Google’s ambitions in the AV space and vast data collection capabilities in the mobile space make it a more interesting case study than Microsoft’s or OSM’s.
Why does he treat the presence of fans and HVAC units on building roofs as an advantage for Google Maps? Isn't that just meaningless visual clutter? Unless I'm looking to land a helicopter on the roof, it's just distracting.
If I were working on maps at Google I'd be looking into ways to remove that sort of content, not emphasize it. Maybe that's Apple's thinking as well.
I wonder how many people missed the interesting conclusion of that article (that places, not map details, are the key when we get to augmented reality and self-driving) since it spent so much time analyzing the differences in the new map and speculating on how they did it. That stuff was cool too, but I think the author had a really good insight that most people are going to miss.
I've been finding Apple's 3D maps a spectacular success over Google's for a while. Yes, they do make it easier to find the building you're looking for. And, give visual clues about where you should be driving. Very little clutter, large fonts make it easier to see the map on your car dashboard. Well done, Apple!
How is the live traffic integration? I've been using Waze exclusively because of traffic data. I'm otherwise not very fond of the app and would love to move to something else, but the highly accurate and current traffic info is just such a time saver
I just want a mode where I can see a list of directions without starting turn by turn navigation. I grew up in a time before turn by turn, and I do find it useful the VERY few times I'm driving in completely new locations. But most of the time I just want to see an overview of how to get to a place and then maybe when it is time to get the last 2 or 3 turns read aloud to me. But no, as soon as a choose a route my phone starts making unwanted noises and blathering about turns I need to make to get out of my driveway.
Apple Maps when using CarPlay does this pretty well. You can use overview mode on the car display which gives you a map of your whole route. A list of instructions comes up on your phone.
I'm using iPhone and iPad but I would never bother with Apple Map as long as it's only available in their app.
I have marked a lot of stars and labels for places. If these are not available on my Linux laptop or web browsers they are totally worthless.
I know Apple made MapKit for embedding and you can share links but it is miles away from enough. Apple has to fully open their map for browsers and even Android to make it actually useful but I doubt they will.
There's something really awesome about reading an in-depth report like this, especially when you can feel the enthusiasm of the author. Dope work as always.
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).
Very interesting. Anecdotally, I've found the new Maps to be much better in its level of detail–at least from the brief time I was able to use it this summer–but from the article it looks like most of that might just be things to make the map look pretty? It seems like Apple is extracting shapes from satellite imagery to make their maps look better, but failing to include actual business and place information.
Google and Apple get all the glory - but some of you folks might find mapy.cz useful, esp when traveling abroad. Mobile app offers even offline tourist maps for the whole world, including contours -- https://en.mapy.cz/turisticka?x=-119.7422922&y=37.8326869&z=...
And the rendering is oh so much better than the Google's. Google maps without aerial imagery is just a blur of grey. You can't see natural landmarks (even basic forrest/not forrest), buildings, blocks, it's all roughly the same color and the map is absolutely useless for what is map supposed to be. It's only good for search and navigation. Of course they save their crap renderer by having very good imagery.
Also, there's https://windymaps.com/app which is the same app I think, just focused on international users.
In general the article is very critical of Apple new maps, but at one point it seems to commend them for removing roads that are no longer there:
> Notice how many of Parkfield’s roads disappear on Apple’s new map. When Apple’s vans visited, they likely saw nothing but empty fields here those roads were supposed to be (...) TomTom’s database somehow has roads from Parkfield’s boomtown days—roads that have been gone for more than 75 years. No wonder why Apple removed them.
I've never been to Parkfield but I don't think removing old roads is a good idea.
In the forests near Paris where I live, there are roads that were built 350 years ago and that ceased to be real "roads" about 150 years ago. Yet they are still passable by foot or on a mountain bike.
Some maps have them (usually, Google maps have them all) and that helps a lot when planning a bike trip for example. Some maps don't, and once you're in the middle of the forest those maps tell you there's literally no way out, which is ridiculous.
They’ve added a bunch of green areas, but there is hardly any notation of trails. Neither Google or Apple is great for trail maps in their default form, but at least Google has higher contrast trail markings with names that are occasionally readable. Apple maps are a miserable failure in this regard.
It's hard to get excited about a work that's still so much in progress. Who will be the target market and in what capacity for the final product? Or is that not to be worried about? This seems like doing something because you can, rather than a large demand for anything about it.
I think this article illustrates a critical issue with Apple's software. The stance on privacy means little machine learning can take place. Little machine learning means that Apple has to resort to more manual techniques. This, in turn, leads to the far inferior (and often dangerously incorrect) place databases and issues with their Maps application.
And then users will simply turn to an alternative which absolutely does not care about their privacy, undoing all of Apple's effort in protecting their users' privacy.
Apple needs to strike a balance between protecting users' privacy and performing analytics. Perhaps send the data off-shore to a location not under US jurisdiction, I don't know. But it is clear that Apple cannot keep up with its competitors with its current practices.
How can violating someone's privacy improve their place database? Extract "I'm waiting at <restaurant name> now" from people's iMessage chats???
Google has been connecting place names by OCRing storefronts taken with their street view cars. Apple claim to be doing the same thing (but apparently doing a far worse job of it)
Two years ago Apple released information on its website about "differential privacy", which is a branch of data analysis that deals with collecting information for analysis that cannot be tied directly back to an individual person.
I think they do a pretty good job with the little data they do collect. For example, I almost exclusively use Apple Maps–it's not like it's unusable. It might help that all my navigation needs fall inside of California, but at least here I haven't had many issues.
It's incredibly detailed in pointing out the differences between old and new Apple Maps, as well as comparing map images from Apple, Google, Tom Tom, and others.
The article demonstrates through the use of animated gifs that Apple Maps has become significantly better over time and in many cases surpasses the quality of competitors.
The workaround will probably be that they end up buying the data from a provider who doesn't care much about privacy.
How they don't yet have a web presence boggles my mind though. I send in small corrections to Google Maps all the time when I notice errors, Apple Maps won't let me do that.
The balance they are striking is that they are collecting trip information, but anonymizing it by only sending segments of a given trip and not the whole thing (as well as by not associating trip data with the user).
Out of a total 123,000 employees around the world, more than half of them works in retail. So say we have 60,000, that includes Marketing, Supply Chains, Sales, Management, Engineering, R&D, Finance, Legal, Design, etc.....
You are telling me they have nearly 10% of workforce works on that bloody pieces of crap called Apple Map?
Has any one seen / uses Apple Map in Japan? South Korea? Taiwan? Hong Kong? ( Excludes China because all Data comes from Government ) Australia?
If anyone has been wondering how Apple got $9 billion Raw Profits from Google for being default search engine and their Margin hasn't increase a bit. Here you got the answer.
Seriously - Apple Maps after 5 years is still not good enough. And we expect Great things from Apple. Not Good or Good enough. At least the Apple when it was ran by Steve Jobs.
It's weird how out of date data in providers like Tom Tom is. I just pulled up the GIS data from Monterey County and it clearly has the same roads that the new Apple Maps shows for Parkfield. (I can't check Markleeville, as Alpine county charges a fee for their GIS data)
My personal favourite was when I lived in Hackney in London, and there was a business listing in Apple Maps (one of the few!) for a garage business that had closed down in 1975, a year before Apple was even formed. That one was pretty special.
The post touches on one of the most important aspects of Apple Maps; it is not a service, no matter what Apple tells its investors. It is a feature for Apple Devices. There in lies the issue. It is not competing with Mapbox, OpenStreetMaps, etc. because those are commercial service providers. It is competing with Google Maps, because that is the default Maps 'feature' for most phones sold in the world. However, Google Maps is in fact a service. Its purpose is to generate local Ads-based revenue for Alphabet. There is no way Apple will be able to catch up to Google, no matter how many Mechanical Turks it throws at them.
Apple management can not make the case spending resources on a mere bullet-point for the sale sheet of the Mac.
Great article discussing the achievements and the missteps of apple's new maps.
Oddly, I found Apple's most successful effort, greenery, to be mixed. It's really cool the data is there! But....the roads are less visible. I think they need to increase the contrast or somehow make the roads more notable amidst the green.
As for the locations, I was surprised to see the limits listed here. Apple seemed supremely confident in their Techcrunch feature. And they rarely preview stuff like this, so I had assumed they had some secret ace. But, this looks rather limited and error filled. Optimistically they only rolled it out to a small area to work out these kinks. But the errors O'bierne highlighted don't seem easily solveablr....time will tell.
I thought about that too, but in these same examples, other buildings were made taller, making it more difficult to see what's behind them, so that can't be it.
Seems like an odd conceit for Apple to make, particularly since they've been pushing the accuracy of their 3D maps, and since you can easily rotate the map in 3D to get a full view of everything. My guess is that their algorithm to calculate the height of buildings from satellite imagery messed up.
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.
Living in a neighborhood with a lot of tree cover, I have recently been very impressed with Apple's 3d geometry lately. My area is effectively houses in the woods. I'm amazed they have been able to extract geometry and textures below heavy tree coverage. The foliage geometry is often rough, but the houses, yards, decks, walkways, etc below are quite detailed. Having a little experience with photogrammetry years ago, I'd love to know their process.
Guessing that the methods and output of human generated maps are used as labelled training data that will be used to scale out when they apply ML to other areas.
The CPAD dataset has a huge amount of California green space. Even grassy medians. I wonder if they started with that and then did their ground truthing? And if they didn’t - well, they should have.
Semi-related: I’ve seen instances where Google Maps in Southern California has the same street label typos as the CAMS dataset. And I don’t know why but I suspect that Google might not admit that they use such a public dataset as seed data.
So I recently chose to work in SF as opposed to Seattle (partially) on account of the amount of green I saw on Apple Maps in SF as compared to Seattle. Would have been nice to see this article before hand....
Cool, my very own Yuba City featured on the maps update. Indeed, it's pretty nice... But I'm still more excited about being able to use Waze in Carplay than any kind of Apple maps updates.
It has the freakin' Fire Trail we used to have to run for crew team workouts twice a week from Strawberry Canyon to the research buildings way up in the hills. That's kinda amazing.
TLDR; Apple has added a lot of vegetation information on map which makes maps look more "fuller". They are also doing better 3D models of buildings in very small area, very likely using 5000 humans in India as opposed to machine learning like Google does.
Apple is really stepping up and showing Google it has some power. When they broke the map relationship with google in 2012 I was super skeptical, as were many. But in a very apple-like way - it's starting to come together.
I still use Google for nav but I have a feeling Apple might win me over on this one.
Some comments were deferred for faster rendering.
reaperducer|7 years ago
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 frustrating when Apple and Google show a highway shield instead of a street name in an urban area. Yes, lots of streets in urban areas are also state highways. But the state highway designations only appear in real life every few miles, while the street signs I'm standing under appear on every corner.
But the greatest sin is omission. Each month I have to render about 70,000 maps from towns and cities from the Philippines to Nova Scotia. And every month I spend three days manually placing towns and businesses that exist in no online maps.
And it's not just tiny towns on far away islands. I'm talking about places in Oklahoma and Arizona and even California that either don't exist, or are stupendously wrong.
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.
GuiA|7 years ago
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Contribute_map_data
bluntfang|7 years ago
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 challenge would be managing the partnership between the map customers like google and apple..
If anyone wants to fund this and/or has the connections to play sales/product manager, DM me.. :p
mastazi|7 years ago
Last year's article from the same author [1] about Goggle Maps' use of photogrammetry and other building scanning techiques was, in my opinion, one of the most interesting HN submissions ever (its comment section[2] is also worth a read).
[1] https://www.justinobeirne.com/google-maps-moat
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15965653
saagarjha|7 years ago
wsgeorge|7 years ago
lvs|7 years ago
[deleted]
mulmen|7 years ago
Apple and Google maps are both worthless as maps without typing in an actual address and using navigation because they can't just show the main cross street names on the screen. It absolutely blows my mind that map products ship without street names clearly visible at all times.
The before/after map of downtown SF actually shows less useful data about the city. It no longer shows the names of Mission or Market streets. The fancy 3D representations of buildings don't help me negotiate on the ground.
crazygringo|7 years ago
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 the time I've zoomed and panned enough to find whatever random faraway place manages to have a label (feels like an unwanted game of whack-a-mole, where will the label pop up??), I can't tell if I've zoomed over to a parallel street instead.
And the solution is so simple too: whenever you zoom in enough that there's enough room on a visible street to put a label, then put the label! I mean if I zoom in so far that only the one street is visible and there's no other text on it, but Maps still leaves it blank... it just feels inexcusable.
stanleydrew|7 years ago
"AVs navigate themselves—so all we’ll really need to know is where we want to go. And Google, with a rapidly-growing autonomy project of its own, seems to have caught on to this.
"If you zoom out on Google Maps’s recent features, you’ll notice that they’re increasingly about figuring out “where to go?”
"And even Google’s map seems to be following this pattern. Over the last two years, Google has gradually been turning it inside out, from a road map to a place map.
"Is Google future-proofing itself against a not-too-distant world that has little need for driving directions? Whether or not that’s true, it does seem as if place information might be even more important tomorrow than it is today."
ianleighton|7 years ago
When driving in some countries in Europe a GPS will repeat that you should use <really long badly pronounced street names after an old white guy> for multiple steps when in fact the road signs don’t mention the street anywhere and just say “Center”. (Granted sometimes the GPS directions are correct and use signage info.) Or the street name may have changed 5 times, as you keep driving straight on the same road.
The problem, as with all things in maps, isn’t so clear-cut and the fixation on street names is very centric to certain countries.
brylie|7 years ago
https://www.openstreetmap.org/
Also, Mapbox has a powerful map styling UI that lets you choose exactly what map elements to display at a given zoom level:
https://www.mapbox.com/
We can basically build or contribute to alternatives that better suit our needs.
bdamm|7 years ago
I find it hard to believe that so much work could go into maps when actually using it doesn't seem to be the main goal. How am I going to use this greenery information?
kabacha|7 years ago
Sometimes I just can't type name in local language correctly but I know the street name where it is and yet I can't find it by looking at the map without extreme zoom in. Searching the street name seems to give a completely random point. I end up zooming to random streets where I think mine should be over and over until I find my street - what a ridiculous process.
There's so much empty space - this obsession with form over function has to stop.
I've switched to one of openstreetmaps clients for this reason alone. They're not afraid of showing actual information.
dilap|7 years ago
I just don't think it's a priority anymore -- they want the map to "look pretty" and people to use turn-by-turn nav.
I agree it's a shame and extremely frustrating.
cjf101|7 years ago
So to some extent Apple's designers and developers know the value of understand what streets are around, but that knowledge isn't evenly distributed/applied.
xapata|7 years ago
This reminds me of all the complaints about Apple's Touch Bar, saying there aren't affordances for touch typing.
bo1024|7 years ago
edgarvaldes|7 years ago
girzel|7 years ago
gordon_freeman|7 years ago
matt4077|7 years ago
The first would seem valid, if Mission St is, as I gather, rather important. FWIW: after searching for Mission District, the street is now visible far more often. It's labeled even at a zoom level where the water on the east and west are comfortably within the frame.
The decision of de-emphasising street names for the benefit of landmarks/museums/event locations etc. is rather subjective: I often use Maps for purposes other than directions, such as getting a feel for an apartment's neighbourhood, finding restaurants, exploring places in the news, or that appeared in books or movies, or even just "sightseeing".
For all these purposes, the style of Google and Apple Maps is obviously far better than traditional folding maps.
You seem to do direction planning the "old-school" way of manually planning a path from A to B. But that mode has been somewhat deprecated, because typing an address and getting a specific route happens to be far better for this purpose. It's not so much decreasing skills in map reading the luddites so often bemoan: In unfamiliar locations, Google has so much more information, such as both typical and real-time traffic, specific expected times to negotiate every intersection, up-to-date road closures etc. Plus a slightly better shortest path algorithm than eyeballing it.
To get back to shrubbery: I rather shrug. Because you're right that it's less important than roads. But by its nature as just the background colour, I believe it does not actually compete with street labels, at least not in the way that other labels do.
agumonkey|7 years ago
ouchjars|7 years ago
Google knows they're there because they do show up in a search, but that doesn't work if you don't remember the name. I saw a restaurant while walking, went to look it up later, knew it was somewhere on a particular street, and had to resort to Street View to find it. Luckily the last Street View picture was from just after the restaurant first opened.
Presumably these businesses haven't ever paid for advertising.
Apple Maps is no better in my area. It has a few popular places and one shop that was demolished in 2002.
sid-kap|7 years ago
raverbashing|7 years ago
Really. It seems they actually put some effort into showing the names of most streets except the one you're interested in. No, really.
It's amazing how often this happens, because it's almost mind reading at this point.
dpkonofa|7 years ago
phs318u|7 years ago
What would be awesome is if the UI didn't assume I wanted to drop a pin when I'm pointing at a spot on the map - it could popup the info with an option to add a pin, or just touch away to not do that.
docker_up|7 years ago
LoSboccacc|7 years ago
gumby|7 years ago
Thus user research probably shows that people don't want it or even complain about it.
docker_up|7 years ago
Later versions of Google Maps didn't do this, so on some streets, you would have no idea what the street names were, and would have to zoom out or scroll out until you saw the name.
THIS is what I want fixed. I don't care about vegetation, I want to be able to see what the street names are without distracting myself on the map.
ObsoleteNerd|7 years ago
It's a disturbing trend in tech in general. Looks over function. Everything from websites to apps to actual physical products, design is more important than functionality.
puzzle|7 years ago
The modern Google Maps does a lot of the layout and rendering on the client or on the fly, with a differing set of constraints and tradeoffs. It also has many more landmarks.
You can see this in action by going to https://mapstyle.withgoogle.com/ and playing with the "Landmarks" control.
nicbou|7 years ago
nazca|7 years ago
ehsankia|7 years ago
zongitsrinzler|7 years ago
kurthr|7 years ago
s0rce|7 years ago
oh_hello|7 years ago
heavymark|7 years ago
stephen_g|7 years ago
*whole world. Apple maps users are not just in the US.
I think your concerns might be overstated though. Hopefully they've just decided to heavily focus on this area up to now to tune their algorithms etc. and will be able to roll it out much more quickly from here on out.
POIs definitely need to be much improved but there seems to be some very solid street data updates with this.
toasterlovin|7 years ago
jameshatheway|7 years ago
Here's a side by side of West Bay, Seven Mile Beach and Boddentown, between Apple Maps on the left and Google Maps on the right.
I understand that its not a huge market (even though there's something like 2 million+ cruise shippers stopping every year), but man... it really makes me not trust it anywhere when the map is completely wrong, geographically speaking
https://i.imgur.com/4DaiXyp.png https://i.imgur.com/f5nerNY.png
zbrox|7 years ago
doque|7 years ago
geekrax|7 years ago
The author definitely enjoys compiling these amazing essays and share this knowledge.
Thank you, Justin!
nicbou|7 years ago
Osmose|7 years ago
My partner briefly worked for a human-powered 3d mapping firm; they would get satellite and plane/drone photography of a large swath of land, split it up into block-sized chunks, and then each worker would take a block and use an in-house program to model the buildings at a pretty impressive level of detail. Workers got paid per-block and blocks were priced based on their complexity. They've been doing this for over 10 years by this point, so it's not an entirely unknown or uncommon thing to handle this kind of work manually.
ksec|7 years ago
imgabe|7 years ago
Figuring out how many trees there are.
Do the directions work?
stevenjohns|7 years ago
I'm talking postcard-perfect views around the Sydney harbor, small beaches around various bays, isolated parks near beautiful rivers and a whole lot of other places that are really beautiful and probably only known to the locals. Lots of these places were a brisk walk away from high-traffic areas too.
This is not to dismiss your question on the directions, though, which is certainly an important part of using maps on a phone.
chipotle_coyote|7 years ago
As the linked blog post shows, they're definitely not perfect; I haven't encountered anything particularly egregious, but the fun thing about maps is that virtually everyone will run into what are ostensibly "edge cases" eventually. Apple Maps has steered me wrong before, but so has Google and Waze. (Waze has gotten much better at destinations in the last few years, after their purchase by Google, although they still have a disquieting penchant for "shortcut" directions that include "make this uncontrolled left turn across three lanes of traffic." Not only does Apple rarely do that, Google rarely does that.)
leokennis|7 years ago
When I’m blasting down a highway, not so much.
godelski|7 years ago
That said, it was fine for anything that was on major highways.
stephen_g|7 years ago
It's just making the map data match the real world better, and making it useful for more than just driving.
acomjean|7 years ago
http://gis.cambridgema.gov/dpw/trees/trees_walk.html
Or pick a tree for adoption?
https://www.cambridgema.gov/IWantTo/AdoptATree
Cambridge MA arborist has mapped all its trees.
towndrunk|7 years ago
Sadly for Apple Maps... No.
bitcurious|7 years ago
Another possible explanation is the TomTom was using these unlikely to be visited streets as trap streets.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trap_street
>In cartography, a trap street is a fictitious entry in the form of a misrepresented street on a map, often outside the area the map nominally covers, for the purpose of "trapping" potential copyright violators of the map who, if caught, would be unable to explain the inclusion of the "trap street" on their map as innocent. On maps that are not of streets, other "copyright trap" features may be inserted or altered for the same purpose.
underwater|7 years ago
astrange|7 years ago
megablast|7 years ago
rconti|7 years ago
I've always found Google vs Apple maps discussions to be interesting, as I've always vastly preferred Apple Maps data for walking around places; Google Maps too often had poor building shapes that looked nothing like the real thing, or hid business names at the scale I was trying to use. Perhaps that's because I live in the Bay Area. When I'm overseas, in particular, I don't hesitate to go to Google Maps first.
jillesvangurp|7 years ago
I used to work in Nokia in the maps division that later became Here. I still remember when Nokia disrupted a market then dominated by the likes Tom Tom and a few others by giving away the maps for free along with every phone. Initially this was a subscription service that you had to opt into. But releasing it for free changed a lot of things.
One of those things was Google accelerating their own maps production and terminating their licensing of Nokia's Navteq maps. It took them many years after that to catch up in terms of quality after that. They had to rely on Teleatlas (now Tom Tom) for quite some time while slowly building out their maps. This is a huge investment and a lot of work. I'd say they definitely pulled ahead only a few years ago with very decent world wide coverage for most of their feature set. Here maps is still better qualitatively in some areas but their feature set is just not great at this point and they've lost most of the consumer mind share they used to have under Nokia. They are still unrivaled for offline navigation on the road and they completely own the in car navigation market at this point (around 70-80% marketshare).
Apple maps inception was around 2011ish around the time their relationship with Google soured. Actually several of my former colleagues ended up working for them after the Nokia implosion. They prematurely launched the first version and they are still heavily dependent on Tom Tom's Teleatlas (again) after last year's revision which improved things considerably. The stuff in this article is nice but world coverage like this is quite far out. Also, you can bet Google will take the hint and get their hands dirty improving their algorithms. The genius with their operation is that they are really good at collecting data, so new algorithms can be applied world wide. This is where Apple is behind: they lack the data coverage that Google has been investing in for the last decade.
coldtea|7 years ago
Hilarious that you consider that they consider the job done. This is a random blog post.
For one "they" made no official statement about considering the job done.
Second, obviously this is just an incremental rollout.
Third, TFA mentions they already have data for (but not exposed) something like 90% of the US.
gambiting|7 years ago
TomTom then Google Maps then literally anything else, then Apple Maps at the very end. It's hilarious how empty Apple Maps are, and considering that until very recently they were the only option for Apple CarPlay for navigation, that was extremely bad. Seriously, it was so bad that I would consider my car's built-in, shitty 5-year old sat nav system over using Apple Maps, it's that bad. Google Maps is still lacking in many many aspects(it has no idea which streets are one way, has no idea about no-left/right turn signs, it still connects roads on the map which are not connected in reality, its database of POI is lackluster at best - TomTom doesn't seem to have any of those issues), but god, Apple Maps outside of US is just bad.
shadowfiend|7 years ago
fs111|7 years ago
If you own something you tend to use that more instead of buying something else...
chrisseaton|7 years ago
It's the whole of northern California isn't it? I wouldn't refer to places like Eureka as 'the Bay Area'.
forgot-my-pw|7 years ago
foobarian|7 years ago
max76|7 years ago
nlawalker|7 years ago
hoorayimhelping|7 years ago
intopieces|7 years ago
rurban|7 years ago
Why Microsoft? They collaborated very early with a very good mapping university institute, which invented creating 3d data from stereo images, from air photos and car-level photos (for the facades), and so on, and then offered the city and regional surveyor officed cooperation contracts. they usually gave the best GIS data of all.
A few years later Google came into this business by getting the rights for US satellite data, but with satellite data you are always behind. no 3d extraction possible and always 4 years behind. local airplane stereo photos are done yearly to find illegal buildings and collect taxes for them. they are done by the state and cities.
OpenStreetMap is crowdfunded so the level of detail is unmatched of course.
I coded such 3d extraction from stereo photos in the late 80ies for our local city land surveyor office. the roof details and height was much better then than today's public data in Google or Apple' maps. feature extraction was half automatic, guided with manual help.
macintux|7 years ago
If you look at previous articles, he does a good job of analyzing Google’s strategy for the future of maps.
Perhaps he feels Google’s ambitions in the AV space and vast data collection capabilities in the mobile space make it a more interesting case study than Microsoft’s or OSM’s.
CamperBob2|7 years ago
If I were working on maps at Google I'd be looking into ways to remove that sort of content, not emphasize it. Maybe that's Apple's thinking as well.
ccostes|7 years ago
starchild_3001|7 years ago
ajmurmann|7 years ago
EugeneOZ|7 years ago
keyle|7 years ago
All in all, what I've learnt is how many petabytes must be involved in mapping the US and the world and the 3D aspects.
saagarjha|7 years ago
Calib3r|7 years ago
Macha|7 years ago
RKearney|7 years ago
dwighttk|7 years ago
pat2man|7 years ago
kbumsik|7 years ago
I have marked a lot of stars and labels for places. If these are not available on my Linux laptop or web browsers they are totally worthless.
I know Apple made MapKit for embedding and you can share links but it is miles away from enough. Apple has to fully open their map for browsers and even Android to make it actually useful but I doubt they will.
zawerf|7 years ago
There were even demos of the reverse, where you take a street map and convert it back into a plausible photorealistic satellite image. [2]
[1] https://phillipi.github.io/pix2pix/ specifically https://phillipi.github.io/pix2pix/images/sat2map1_AtoB/late...
[2] https://phillipi.github.io/pix2pix/images/map2sat1_BtoA/late...
40acres|7 years ago
cheeze|7 years ago
mrfusion|7 years ago
nod|7 years ago
aetherspawn|7 years ago
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).
mywacaday|7 years ago
I've been browsing this recently for Ireland http://map.geohive.ie/mapviewer.html
Really nice tool to see old maps/aerial photos overlaid with current surveys. Photos go back 25 years and maps back to the 1800s
Great use of public money by Ordnance Survey Ireland to provide public access to public data.
saagarjha|7 years ago
sajagi|7 years ago
rplnt|7 years ago
Also, there's https://windymaps.com/app which is the same app I think, just focused on international users.
doque|7 years ago
chaostheory|7 years ago
This is both good and bad for Google Maps. Scammers have polluted Google Maps with bad locksmith entries: https://www.gimletmedia.com/reply-all/78-very-quickly-to-the...
bambax|7 years ago
In general the article is very critical of Apple new maps, but at one point it seems to commend them for removing roads that are no longer there:
> Notice how many of Parkfield’s roads disappear on Apple’s new map. When Apple’s vans visited, they likely saw nothing but empty fields here those roads were supposed to be (...) TomTom’s database somehow has roads from Parkfield’s boomtown days—roads that have been gone for more than 75 years. No wonder why Apple removed them.
I've never been to Parkfield but I don't think removing old roads is a good idea.
In the forests near Paris where I live, there are roads that were built 350 years ago and that ceased to be real "roads" about 150 years ago. Yet they are still passable by foot or on a mountain bike.
Some maps have them (usually, Google maps have them all) and that helps a lot when planning a bike trip for example. Some maps don't, and once you're in the middle of the forest those maps tell you there's literally no way out, which is ridiculous.
londons_explore|7 years ago
shaklee3|7 years ago
s1mon|7 years ago
musgrove|7 years ago
xvector|7 years ago
And then users will simply turn to an alternative which absolutely does not care about their privacy, undoing all of Apple's effort in protecting their users' privacy.
Apple needs to strike a balance between protecting users' privacy and performing analytics. Perhaps send the data off-shore to a location not under US jurisdiction, I don't know. But it is clear that Apple cannot keep up with its competitors with its current practices.
kalleboo|7 years ago
Google has been connecting place names by OCRing storefronts taken with their street view cars. Apple claim to be doing the same thing (but apparently doing a far worse job of it)
donarb|7 years ago
Here's one example article on the subject:
https://machinelearning.apple.com/2017/12/06/learning-with-p...
saagarjha|7 years ago
robotkdick|7 years ago
It's incredibly detailed in pointing out the differences between old and new Apple Maps, as well as comparing map images from Apple, Google, Tom Tom, and others.
The article demonstrates through the use of animated gifs that Apple Maps has become significantly better over time and in many cases surpasses the quality of competitors.
kristofferR|7 years ago
How they don't yet have a web presence boggles my mind though. I send in small corrections to Google Maps all the time when I notice errors, Apple Maps won't let me do that.
toasterlovin|7 years ago
briandear|7 years ago
ksec|7 years ago
You are telling me they have nearly 10% of workforce works on that bloody pieces of crap called Apple Map?
Has any one seen / uses Apple Map in Japan? South Korea? Taiwan? Hong Kong? ( Excludes China because all Data comes from Government ) Australia?
If anyone has been wondering how Apple got $9 billion Raw Profits from Google for being default search engine and their Margin hasn't increase a bit. Here you got the answer.
Seriously - Apple Maps after 5 years is still not good enough. And we expect Great things from Apple. Not Good or Good enough. At least the Apple when it was ran by Steve Jobs.
ummonk|7 years ago
Mindwipe|7 years ago
muddi900|7 years ago
Apple management can not make the case spending resources on a mere bullet-point for the sale sheet of the Mac.
graeme|7 years ago
Oddly, I found Apple's most successful effort, greenery, to be mixed. It's really cool the data is there! But....the roads are less visible. I think they need to increase the contrast or somehow make the roads more notable amidst the green.
As for the locations, I was surprised to see the limits listed here. Apple seemed supremely confident in their Techcrunch feature. And they rarely preview stuff like this, so I had assumed they had some secret ace. But, this looks rather limited and error filled. Optimistically they only rolled it out to a small area to work out these kinks. But the errors O'bierne highlighted don't seem easily solveablr....time will tell.
IvyMike|7 years ago
freeflight|7 years ago
saagarjha|7 years ago
Digit-Al|7 years ago
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.
unknown|7 years ago
[deleted]
oh_hello|7 years ago
discordance|7 years ago
ryantgtg|7 years ago
Semi-related: I’ve seen instances where Google Maps in Southern California has the same street label typos as the CAMS dataset. And I don’t know why but I suspect that Google might not admit that they use such a public dataset as seed data.
lukas099|7 years ago
I don't know a single person with a backyard tennis court, and there appear to be 6 in a small area here. Where am I looking?
unknown|7 years ago
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bufferoverflow|7 years ago
https://static1.squarespace.com/static/54ff63f0e4b0bafce6932...
shanehoban|7 years ago
Apple make things look amazing and work decently.
Google make things work amazingly and look decent.
lifeisstillgood|7 years ago
It's the thought that they just got in their cars and drove up to buildings and harbours and cloverleafs and checked.
That bit just says a lot about ... accuracy.
Doctor_Fegg|7 years ago
basil-rash|7 years ago
NDizzle|7 years ago
eevilspock|7 years ago
appealallegator|7 years ago
bangonkeyboard|7 years ago
"It's not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works."
mrlatinos|7 years ago
telltruth|7 years ago
PieUser|7 years ago
exabrial|7 years ago
jws|7 years ago
unknown|7 years ago
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mcphage|7 years ago
ship_it|7 years ago
.. proceed to explain how Apple Maps covers just 3.1% of the U.S.’s land area.
Sent from my iPhone
eugene3306|7 years ago
EDIT: check out this map of Dubai: https://2gis.ae/dubai?queryState=center%2F55.274674%2C25.197...
Also check out its search UX. Try searching for "grocery"
outworlder|7 years ago
daveheq|7 years ago
DanBC|7 years ago
vivaespanya|7 years ago
SamvitJ|7 years ago
GChevalier|7 years ago
puma1|7 years ago
gcbw2|7 years ago
Most subtle changes I noticed on the examples on street names (e.g. "W 9th st" to "ninth street", sans "w") are actually a downgrade.
mgamarro|7 years ago
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mgamarro|7 years ago
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Endy|7 years ago
snambi|7 years ago
beders|7 years ago
ben174|7 years ago
I still use Google for nav but I have a feeling Apple might win me over on this one.