Sunday 21 October 2012

Breaking News 66: Cult of Mac: In Defense of Apple’s Awesome Maps App [Opinion]

Breaking News 66
World news.....www.breakingnews66.koolcentre.in,movies news.....www.koolcentre.in
Cult of Mac: In Defense of Apple's Awesome Maps App [Opinion]
Oct 21st 2012, 18:24

Cult of Mac
Breaking news for Apple fans
In Defense of Apple's Awesome Maps App [Opinion]
Oct 21st 2012, 17:55

Apple’s Maps app is a bomb. A stinker. A sign of the company’s impending doom at the hands of Tim Cook, the CEO who replaced the irreplaceable Steve Jobs.

Landmarks are in the wrong place. Roads are missing. The 3D Flyover view looks like a collapsed sponge cake. There are no directions for buses, bikes or pedestrians. Entire cities are marked as hospitals, the Golden Gate Bridge is in the wrong place, and even Apple’s own retail stores can’t be found. It’s such an embarrasment, Tim Cook apologized for its suckiness.

But if you live in San Francisco, the Maps app rocks. I’ve been using Maps for weeks and I’ve fallen in love with it. I use it even if I’m *not* using it, just to watch the gorgeous 3D display unfold as I’m driving around.

Apple’s Maps app is by far the best maps sofware around. Tim Cook is a wussy. You’d love Maps too —  if you lived in a geography where it works.

I know there’s a lot of places Maps does’t work. New England for example. It’s unusable around Boston, according to our own John Brownlee, Cult of Mac’s deputy editor.

But here in Bay Area, it’s absolutely awesome.

The 3D turn-by-turn directions, for example, are a joy. It’s a blast to watch the 3D renderings of the city as I drive around. I have my iPhone 5 mounted on top of the dash, right in front of the windscreen. It’s totally Blade Runner to watch the virtual city on the iPhone mirror the real city through the windshield.

In addition, turn-by-turn is great on the iPhone 5 in portrait mode — the new iPhone’s longer screen is perfect for turn-by-turn. You can see what’s coming up well in advance. No more surprise turns or last-minute freeway exits.

The performance is phenomenal. Because Maps is vector based, maps are much quicker to download and draw than Google’s tile-based approach. I’ve frequently been frustrated by missing tiles in Google Maps, or having to wait forever to get enough data to zoom in or out. This doesn’t happen in Apple’s Maps. Zooming and panning is fluid and quick.

There have been lots of complaints about missing and incomplete data, like the paucity of points of interest. But in SF, there are all the restaurants, bars, coffee shops, museums and gas stations you could possibly want. Even my neighbor’s obscure little auto upholstery businesses, which he runs out his garage, is listed.

3D Flyover

The 3D Flyover is nothing short of astonishing. I’ve spent hours — literally hours — exploring my home city, as well as London, Los Angeles and New York in glorious photo-realistic 3D.

3D flyover allows you rotate, pan and zoom through the city as if it was modeled on a high-powered workstation, not your iPhone. It uses footage taken by airplanes flying over the city, run through technology originally developed for missile-guidance systems from Swedish defense contractor Saab AB. The result is a weird blend of computer model and birds-eye aerial photography — and it must be seen to be believed.

It’s crazy how much detail the technology captures. My neighborhood is picture perfect in every detail and from every angle, including directly above. You can peer right into my back yard, which can’t be seen from the street, and my neighbor’s too. It’s almost an invasion of privacy.

Here’s a shot of where I live: San Francisco’s Bernal Heights neighborhood.

Here’s the same view of my neighborhood in Google Earth, which I used to think was pretty extraordinary. But it looks hopelessly primitive compared to Apple’s flyover. Buildings are lumpy and ill-defined; and there’s nothing like the same level of detail. In flyover, I can see the pipework on the back of my house; In Google Earth, my house is a squidgy blob.

Here’s a video explaining how the 3D flyover views are obtained:

It’s a digital doll house on the scale of an entire city. It’s mind-boggling. The doll house effect in accentuated by the complete absence of people in the flyovers. Whereas Google Maps’ Street View shows people with their faces blurred, there’s not a soul in Apple’s flyovers. It’s like the rapture. However, there are ghosts of people and vehicles, which suggests the flyovers edit out moving objects. To capture a building in 3D you need to capture it from many different angles. Multiple shots are stacked on top of each other. People move, the buildings don’t.

I don’t think Tim Cook has anything to apologize for, especially when you compare Apple’s Maps to the alternatives. Cook recommend unhappy users check out Mapquest or Waze while Apple gets it act together. Waze is solid, but its interface is horrible. It’s ugly to the point of unusable. In Mapquest, search just doesn’t work. Look for “Chase Field” and you get banks or businesses with “Chase” or “Field” in them, but not Phoenix’s downtown ballpark. This doesn’t happen with Google Maps or Apple’s Maps. It just works.

Google Maps is the gold standard, but I’ve always had problems with the actual directions it provides. I’ve often been mystified by some of the routes Google Maps suggests. Several times it’s been flat out wrong. Not so with Apple Maps. The routes are rational.

Of course, I used Google Maps for years and I’ve only been using Apple Maps for a few weeks, but so far, the routes it suggests are ones that make sense. It does a good job of providing alternatives routes also. The big hole is routing for pedestrians, bikes and public transit; these did work very well in Google’s Maps. It’s early days yet for Apple Maps; let’s hope they get added in the future.

And then there’s aesthetics. Apple’s Maps is just gorgeous. The colors, the textures, the fonts. I’m not much of a design snob, but Maps brings it out in me. I can barely look at Google Maps anymore. I used to like its bare utilty, but now it’s just ugly.

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