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Comment by watbe | Hacker News Reader

Looks like the Google Earth Flight Simulator[0] didn't make the cut. Many features are missing from the original desktop app and it's not immediately clear what this offers over using "Earth" within Google Maps. The "auto-rotate around the landmark" feature is also a pain for people who are used to maps being north-facing by default.

[0] https://googlesystem.blogspot.co.uk/2007/08/google-earth-eas...

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It seems this is the Google way. They kill one product (especially a desktop product) and it takes years till the new one is on every feature on the same level as the old one... look at Picasa vs. Google Photos. Even today Picasa can do many more things that Google Photos cannot do today. I'm sure the native/old Google Earth has a ton of stuff which is not ported to the web version.

Good they cannot convert Chrome itself as a web app :D

It makes some amount of sense because there's less to maintain and more cultural knowledge of the new codebase. Instead of saying "We're removing features from Picasa because nobody here knows how they work and everyone's scared to change things", they can say "We have a shiny new project here that will eventually be better than Picasa". It's a nice PR stunt.

I can tell you for a fact though that at least some of the senior Engineers who developed Picasa are still at Google.

None of which are on the photos team or have the time to rewrite it for the newer stacks.

That is true.

Last part of your comment reminds me of the birth & death of javascript [0]

[0] https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/the-birth-and-death...

I find it interesting that they recently introduced location sharing to Google Maps as a new feature... which it had back in 2009, until they got rid of it.

They had tons of handy features in Google Maps before it was redesigned using Material Design. We used the route elevation data often to plan hiking trips with our parents to determine if they would be able to make a trek. The map scale was absent from the first couple releases and when they reintroduced it, it would only appear on zoom and then vanish. It took 3 or 4 more releases for them to finally add an option buried in the settings to make it always on.

I'd like to say they did this to present a clean minimalist app but the recent incarnations of it are more cluttered than the pre Material Design version. Sure you can tap on the map to minimize the clutter and then tap again to make it go away completely but tapping also drops a pin if you hold it for a sixteenth of a second longer. And I hope your touchscreen isn't super sensitive because it'll detect that flutter as a double tap and then you're just zooming.

The ability to show photo hotspots on the map and look at the photos was really handy for planning trips to unfamiliar places (or even familiar ones, really), but AFAI can tell it's gone now. Seems it was part of some service they bought, integrated, then killed.

I believe you can get the photos by using the street view person. (That is, drag the street view person over the map and the photos show up as pins)

If you'd like to plan trips that have elevation data, I highly recommend komoot.com. It uses OpenStreetMap, and is a great tool for planning hiking or cycling trips.

I'll check it out, thanks. We were using Maps in a more adhoc manner when touring Scotland. It was great, now not so much.

For any serious trip abroad I use OSMand (but only on Android) ... you can use hiking routes (GPX), all offline (great if you have no phone signal). Also helped me more than once for parking or finding the next public toilet (haha). You can even using for skiing, biking or navigation on the water.

And regarding elevation it seems it is also there inside: https://github.com/osmandapp/Osmand/issues/1795

OSMand has the worst UX I have ever experienced. Hands down.

Personally I use Gaia GPS and Pocket Earth for hiking/nature.

When was the last time you used it? 2 years ago I would agree.

It was part of Google+ until very recently. So my guess is, that they just moved it.

> Good they cannot convert Chrome itself as a web app :D

http://trevorlinton.github.io/

Could they presumably write it as a non-native app? Would there be any issues with that? Presumably the "chrome" around a webpage isn't particularly intensive?

Firefox wants to do that:

https://github.com/browserhtml/browserhtml

Can't do cross-origin requests. It would need to be an electron-style app.

also I noticed that at least in Switzerland, the imagery is significantly older than the one of the "Earth" layer in google maps. If I had to guess, I would say the images on Google Earth are from 2011, whereas the ones in Google Maps seem very current: last summer.

edit: Actually, the "earth" layer of Google Maps is identical to Google Earth. What's more up-to-date is the "satellite" layer which I only see offered in the mobile apps.

There was a point where you could choose from which time to view the data. Very useful feature. Might even still be in there somewhere if you find the right chicken to sacrifice to make it appear.

Google sure spends an incredible amount of money making their UIs worse (and usually increasing memory use by a large multiplier at the same time).

>Google sure spends an incredible amount of money making their UIs worse (and usually increasing memory use by a large multiplier at the same time).

Isn't everyone doing this these days? All the UIs on PC software have been getting worse since the mid-2000s.

> The "auto-rotate around the landmark" feature

I think of this as "Drone View". I keep waiting for the JDAM impact.

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