The Amazing iOS 6 Maps(theamazingios6maps.tumblr.com)
theamazingios6maps.tumblr.com
The Amazing iOS 6 Maps
http://theamazingios6maps.tumblr.com/
371 comments
The "roller coaster" effects in the 3-d view are my favorite. They've got some smoothing algorithm going, or it wouldn't curve the way it does, but the elevation data must not have a high enough resolution. Google has made this sort of thing look so easy for so long, but it's clearly very hard to get this stuff right.
So, I guess it's not that surprising that apple messed up something incredibly hard in their first attempt. I'm curious as to whether these issues are as widespread as they seem, or if they're more edge cases made to appear common by the internet. But the curiosity isn't enough to drive me to upgrade. I'm totally putting off that until I figure out a decent alternative app.
So, I guess it's not that surprising that apple messed up something incredibly hard in their first attempt. I'm curious as to whether these issues are as widespread as they seem, or if they're more edge cases made to appear common by the internet. But the curiosity isn't enough to drive me to upgrade. I'm totally putting off that until I figure out a decent alternative app.
What confuses me about Apple's choice of maps here is why they didn't go with OpenStreetMap? It was the perfect opportunity to leapfrog Google and help the open source community at the same time, and they would have had more control over the data - as it is they are beholden to TomTom and other providers to try to get things fixed, or will have to try to merge future map updates with their own patches. As it is they are going to see increasing controversy as people realise just how bad the maps they have bought are, and that this was changed for political reasons, not for the good of their users, and there's very little they can do about it.
They seem to have tried out OSM in the photos app (with a horrible skin), but to have used purchased data for the street maps. Perhaps they felt it wasn't good enough in some locations they tested?
In my experience OSM is superior to Google maps in many locations (even in parts of central London), and it is of course continually improving.
They seem to have tried out OSM in the photos app (with a horrible skin), but to have used purchased data for the street maps. Perhaps they felt it wasn't good enough in some locations they tested?
In my experience OSM is superior to Google maps in many locations (even in parts of central London), and it is of course continually improving.
It seems like the quality level maintained by Steve Jobs is quickly deteriorating in favour of business moves designed to wrest more control off Google. They are operating in a very similar way to other companies now.
Google executives must be laughing very hard right now. If I was Google I'd avoid releasing a Google Maps application for at least a year and let the Android handset manufacturers ruthlessly exploit Android's superior maps.
Google executives must be laughing very hard right now. If I was Google I'd avoid releasing a Google Maps application for at least a year and let the Android handset manufacturers ruthlessly exploit Android's superior maps.
So I've been seeing all this hatin' on HN this morning so I figured I should check it out on my device. I mapped my commute (1 hour) and the only oddity I saw was the waviness coming off of a bridge. Beyond that Philly's buildings were all rendered correctly and my route was exactly the same as Google maps. YMMV
P.S. I must say It was really cool to see Cira Centre (The Amtrak Building) rendered in 3d. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cira_Centre
P.S. I must say It was really cool to see Cira Centre (The Amtrak Building) rendered in 3d. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cira_Centre
What actually bothers me the most, is poor quality of iOS6.
It has several bugs (excluding maps and unfortunate wifi bug), which already have affected me and users around me. Some most notable include following.
* Sometimes iTunes update screen does not refresh,
* You can't disable vibration for notifications per application (i love my email in notification center, still - i do not need it to vibrate; in 5.1 it worked).
* Also, phone from time to time vibrates, though nothing has happened (no new notifications or alerts).
* Most annoying one is that they changed keyboard input, so you can't enter special characters (common in Latvian) by holding and swiping left/right. You have to swipe up and then left/right. Makes big deal, when typing.
I know it all will be fixed in 6.0.1, but still - there is visible decline in quality of provided software, which actually makes me very sad as a user.
It has several bugs (excluding maps and unfortunate wifi bug), which already have affected me and users around me. Some most notable include following.
* Sometimes iTunes update screen does not refresh,
* You can't disable vibration for notifications per application (i love my email in notification center, still - i do not need it to vibrate; in 5.1 it worked).
* Also, phone from time to time vibrates, though nothing has happened (no new notifications or alerts).
* Most annoying one is that they changed keyboard input, so you can't enter special characters (common in Latvian) by holding and swiping left/right. You have to swipe up and then left/right. Makes big deal, when typing.
I know it all will be fixed in 6.0.1, but still - there is visible decline in quality of provided software, which actually makes me very sad as a user.
To be honest, despite its flaws, it's going to be ok for most of the people, most of the time. Navigation is going to be a big boon.
Using it I haven't noticed major differences personally. Some restaurants are in the wrong location, but on the flip side I like the yelp reviews.
I'm sure they will improve on the areas that are flawed.
It isn't as much fun, but the imagery of the places I care about is better than google, in some case dramatically better.
Their place data needs a lot of help. e.g. If you look for the nearest hospital from me it will take you to a new retirement community built on the site of an old hospital. It is easy to report the problem, now to see how long until it is fixed.
Their place data needs a lot of help. e.g. If you look for the nearest hospital from me it will take you to a new retirement community built on the site of an old hospital. It is easy to report the problem, now to see how long until it is fixed.
I'm clueless about mapping/geocoding/etc (it's amazing I make it to the grocery store and back) but I keep hearing that Apple needed to get this out there so that they could start getting data feeding back from the millions of iOS users, and thus (presumably rapidly) improving the quality of the maps. Is there any truth at all to that? I don't quite understand where they'd be getting that data back from - e.g. if I search for the hospital and I eventually find it 3 miles down the road from where the map took me, how would Apple/their mapping partners ever know that the POI should be moved?
With maps.google.com (html5 version) I get some of the old functionality back, but the thing I miss most is street view. Having flyover is very pretty for demos but completely useless unless in real use. Street view, however, is actually very useful and I use it on a regular basis. As far as I know there isn't any work around to that. I will try ios6 again, but for now, I'm going to restore my backup until (if) google come out with an iPad version of maps and YouTube (instead of the iPhone only)
The beauty of this: Apple is definitely going to sell record numbers of the iPhone 5, shitty maps or not. And when they eventually do claw their way back to being on par with Google's maps, people will act like they invented maps themselves and all will be forgiven.
While we are ragging on maps...
I live in New York City. Sometimes Google doesn't put the street names on all the streets. I often have to scroll left or right or out to see what street it's on. Obviously you can't list the names on every street when it is zoomed out, but even when there aren't more than 4 or 5 streets on the map, the street names still don't appear. It's like they'd rather list local restaurants than street names. Has anyone else experienced this with Google maps?
I live in New York City. Sometimes Google doesn't put the street names on all the streets. I often have to scroll left or right or out to see what street it's on. Obviously you can't list the names on every street when it is zoomed out, but even when there aren't more than 4 or 5 streets on the map, the street names still don't appear. It's like they'd rather list local restaurants than street names. Has anyone else experienced this with Google maps?
But you're still going to buy Apple because that is what all of your rich and trendy friends use.
I have never owned an Apple product. The main reason for this is related to class and/or culture and financial circumstances. My family was always very frugal and on the lower side of middle class.
And honestly I'm frugal and so when I buy devices I am focused on value and bought a laptop with a good graphics card and other features that I put Linux and Windows on. Also I am not comfortable around people so I have pretty much no friends. If I had more friends in web development I might have felt an overwhelming peer pressure to buy a Mac.
The point is that these decisions are not actually based on technical merit, not for me or for Apple fans, because that's not how humans make decisions. We need to be very careful to take a step back every now and again and make a conscious effort to correct trends towards a more rational basis.
The Apple ecosystem is generally more polished, that is true. However, its also very much closed compared to other systems like Google's and outdated in some ways. For example, Objective-C is a ridiculous over-complex relic and it is very embarrassing that so many people waste their time with it.
Its obvious that we need to focus our attention and money on more egalitarian and open businesses. And pretty soon, even the most open and inexpensive products and services are not going to be a good value as better knowledge and data sharing becomes more practical and popular.
The future is open, knowledge-based (some derivative of KR) operating systems where machine code isn't even allowed. The future is knowledge-based programming language and platform development and evolution. The future is ubiquitous open cross platform applications. The future is content-oriented peer to peer web knowledgebases and applications. The future is open source phones that you print out in 3d on your desk.
The future of technology is open, distributed, cohesive and yet decoupled, mature, substantive, and egalitarian. Apple is none of these things.
I have never owned an Apple product. The main reason for this is related to class and/or culture and financial circumstances. My family was always very frugal and on the lower side of middle class.
And honestly I'm frugal and so when I buy devices I am focused on value and bought a laptop with a good graphics card and other features that I put Linux and Windows on. Also I am not comfortable around people so I have pretty much no friends. If I had more friends in web development I might have felt an overwhelming peer pressure to buy a Mac.
The point is that these decisions are not actually based on technical merit, not for me or for Apple fans, because that's not how humans make decisions. We need to be very careful to take a step back every now and again and make a conscious effort to correct trends towards a more rational basis.
The Apple ecosystem is generally more polished, that is true. However, its also very much closed compared to other systems like Google's and outdated in some ways. For example, Objective-C is a ridiculous over-complex relic and it is very embarrassing that so many people waste their time with it.
Its obvious that we need to focus our attention and money on more egalitarian and open businesses. And pretty soon, even the most open and inexpensive products and services are not going to be a good value as better knowledge and data sharing becomes more practical and popular.
The future is open, knowledge-based (some derivative of KR) operating systems where machine code isn't even allowed. The future is knowledge-based programming language and platform development and evolution. The future is ubiquitous open cross platform applications. The future is content-oriented peer to peer web knowledgebases and applications. The future is open source phones that you print out in 3d on your desk.
The future of technology is open, distributed, cohesive and yet decoupled, mature, substantive, and egalitarian. Apple is none of these things.
Since Apple doesn't have a website for their maps, just knowing what is broken is going to be a problem for them.
I wonder if they will put in a map editor in their next version to crowd source fixes or at least bug reports.
I wonder if they will put in a map editor in their next version to crowd source fixes or at least bug reports.
For those who think this is just a problem with the 3D images, or are not convinced there are serious problems even after seeing this tumblr, try looking outside of California, at both satellite and standard maps. Some example searches:
"Brighton, UK", Satellite - a major UK city is so blurry you can't see streets.
"Grand Cayman, Cayman Islands" - ends up in the middle of the sea, and no roads on the islands at all.
"Colchester" - satellite shows clouds, in B&W
"Senkaku Islands" - compare satellite with standard to see duplicates of these disputed islands.
"Puno,Peru"- in lake Titicaca
etc.
They probably had to rush this out, but it's really not ready for widespread use in some areas; they'd have done better to cut back the features and massively extend their testing (or use a crowd-sourced alternative). Given how extensively this is used in iOS, both by apps using Mapkit and by customers every day round the world, it's vital that is it correct, and getting it wrong in such obvious ways is a massive strategic error on Apple's part.
"Brighton, UK", Satellite - a major UK city is so blurry you can't see streets.
"Grand Cayman, Cayman Islands" - ends up in the middle of the sea, and no roads on the islands at all.
"Colchester" - satellite shows clouds, in B&W
"Senkaku Islands" - compare satellite with standard to see duplicates of these disputed islands.
"Puno,Peru"- in lake Titicaca
etc.
They probably had to rush this out, but it's really not ready for widespread use in some areas; they'd have done better to cut back the features and massively extend their testing (or use a crowd-sourced alternative). Given how extensively this is used in iOS, both by apps using Mapkit and by customers every day round the world, it's vital that is it correct, and getting it wrong in such obvious ways is a massive strategic error on Apple's part.
iPhone 4S with iOS 5 > iPhone 5 with iOS 6
Nice work Apple - that's going to save me a few hundred dollars!
Nice work Apple - that's going to save me a few hundred dollars!
I'd really like to know where the data from Brazil comes from, specifically Florianopolis, SC. The first thing I did when I updated to iOS 6 was testing the maps app. The building I live is at least 5 years old, but the map shows it under construction
I really hope that people are using the 'Report Problem' feature in the app every time they post a screenshot here. Because that is one of the biggest things everyone can do that will help the map data to improve.
Looks like it works well in bay area but outside bay area it's pretty bad. Apparently, Redditors are pretty pissed off - http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/106rvw/new_ios_6...
Looks like AAPL tested it in Cupertino and worked well. Thought it will work well in rest of the world too. Classic mistake?
Looks like AAPL tested it in Cupertino and worked well. Thought it will work well in rest of the world too. Classic mistake?
I just upgraded to iOS 6 last night and just used it to get around downtown Boston. It was unusable. It had some incorrect data about some locations, it was confusing to use, and when I typed in a location, it would look in different cities instead of the one I was currently in. Unfortunately, one of the biggest apps I use regularly has taken a big step backwards.
I just use Waze for turn by turn (iphone 4s) available for blackberry and andriod. Plus if you go to google on mobile safari, it basically pesters you to install a google map shortcut on the "desktop". This works very well.
I'm sure apple maps will get better, but seeing as they're not a search engine, I don't think they'll ever get quite as good at finding by location names.
I'm sure apple maps will get better, but seeing as they're not a search engine, I don't think they'll ever get quite as good at finding by location names.
I think my favourite image was the state park with this caption beneath it, made me laugh out loud: "Valley Forge State Park became Valley Forge National Historical Park a few years ago… in 1976" in all seriousness Apple's maps offering quite clearly isn't up to scratch in comparison to Google's maps application.
While Google have made mapping look easy for a long time now, it quite clearly isn't as easy as Apple thought it was. If Jobs were still alive, maps would never have been released in the state that it currently is. Seems like Apple rushed the release of maps, I wonder what the real agenda for moving away from Google maps in the first place was here? It quite clearly wasn't because Apple had a superior maps offering than Google could offer.
Way to force us iPhone users to use an inferior mapping product. Luckily Google have submitted a maps application to the maps store, but it'll probably get rejected for competing with the iPhone maps application.
While Google have made mapping look easy for a long time now, it quite clearly isn't as easy as Apple thought it was. If Jobs were still alive, maps would never have been released in the state that it currently is. Seems like Apple rushed the release of maps, I wonder what the real agenda for moving away from Google maps in the first place was here? It quite clearly wasn't because Apple had a superior maps offering than Google could offer.
Way to force us iPhone users to use an inferior mapping product. Luckily Google have submitted a maps application to the maps store, but it'll probably get rejected for competing with the iPhone maps application.
And I thought I had it bad with Bing Maps on WP7. Well, goes to show that lower-bounds exist to be breached.
Funny subtitle: "The Apple iOS 6 Maps are amazing. Not."
People seem to think "amazing" == "cool". Not so! It just means astonishing or surprising. Which makes the word so much more interesting to use. "We charge $9 for a bottle of Corona." "That's amazing!"*
So the iOS 6 maps really truly are amazing :)
*True story
People seem to think "amazing" == "cool". Not so! It just means astonishing or surprising. Which makes the word so much more interesting to use. "We charge $9 for a bottle of Corona." "That's amazing!"*
So the iOS 6 maps really truly are amazing :)
*True story
Why did they stop using Google Maps?
In regards to "Where did my university’s buildings go?" (http://theamazingios6maps.tumblr.com/post/31928845471/where-...), it does bother me that so many universities have provided specific map details to Google (see http://google-latlong.blogspot.com/2012/02/map-your-campus-a...), but not OSM.
This [1] made the news in Ireland today, when a city farm in Dublin called "Airfield" was labeled as an airport. It was thought that pilots in trouble might attempt to land there, but I can't see why checking maps on their iPhones would be part of emergency procedure.
[1] http://searchengineland.com/irish-politician-calls-apples-ne...
[1] http://searchengineland.com/irish-politician-calls-apples-ne...
Google spend much time organizing the name of the cities and road in a particular way. Now Apple has another way of doing it, the maps at higher level show less information.
Some city name are picked and some are not, but at a closer level, the cities are there. Their algo to find what to show on the map is just different from Google.
I'm not saying it is better, but different. I am pretty sure the same comparison can be made between google maps and let's say bing maps.
I think Apple did the switch with bad timing, before having a good solution in place... but in the end maybe facing some real technological challenge can be good for them? Every time they have to do serious software / infrastructure stuff they seem to be weak, even with iMessage that is not exactly that super-hard thing to do, there are reliability problems. I hope that this map stuff will make Apple a bit more CS oriented, but not as much as Google is.
How can someone release a product like this !!!
What were the PM, team manager, technical architect, developers and QA doing !!! Didn't they observe this !!!
Is this a deliberate product release ???
What were the PM, team manager, technical architect, developers and QA doing !!! Didn't they observe this !!!
Is this a deliberate product release ???
So that makes me wonder what happened in contract negotiations with Google to force it out. Did Google flat-out say "No"? Seems unlikely. Was it just too expensive? That's possible, especially if these negotiations happened during the time Google massively raised the prices on its API (completely random speculation: maybe the price increase was only about Apple), so Apple had to invest elsewhere. Did Google just want control of their map data or want to give Android a massive competitive edge so they backed out? That seems unlikely, but may be answered if Google doesn't put out a map app for iOS.