When there's only one

...there's only one choice
Everything here is my opinion. I do not speak for your employer.
July 2014
August 2014

2014-07-17 »

I've been trying out Apple Maps as I walk around Oslo and Dublin.  It's actually not bad.

It makes severe mistakes with things like the actual outline of parks (most of them are only coloured green for half the actual park space) but is otherwise doing okay.  If I search for museums, I get museums in Oslo.  The "instant search" results match up exactly with the non-instant search results.  The addresses I've searched for seem to have been accurate.

It also has cool features like not being slow, not forgetting my location and search terms if I exit and reload the app, loading tiles faster on slow networks (I'm on T-Mobile's free+slow international roaming thingy), caching tiles for longer, prefetching tiles that are outside my viewport, displaying the names of important landmarks (useful) instead of landmarks I've visited previously (annoying), remembering my recent search terms, and telling me which way I'm walking (twirly compass view).  The UI has all options readily visible rather than triggered by undiscoverable swipes, drags, and slides.  It uses Yelp for things like restaurant search, which is convenient because that's what I use for restaurant search.

I had imagined they would probably especially suck outside the U.S. (since the map accuracy is bad enough inside the U.S.) but so far, not so much.

In fairness, they have no transit, biking, or walking directions, all of which I've needed while on this trip (and I switched to Google Maps to obtain).  And I have so little trust for their data accuracy that I double check everything with Google Maps just to make sure.  So they certainly don't have a home run yet.  But they're definitely not just fooling around.

I love competition.

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