Comment by sonnyblarney | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sonnyblarney | Hacker News Reader

If Apple staff are reading this - please fix this ridiculous issue - the fact metro stations show up at arbitrary levels of zoom. Zome show up at level x, some show at x+1, and some dissapear at x+1, meaning at many levels, you see some, not others.

Also - an option to basically always show metro/subway locations.

You jam the map full of stuff I'm not interested in - when I'm basically trying to find the subway stop.

A lot of people use the metro in cities. Almost everyone.

It's like the absence of a subway in the Silicon Valley makes you oblivious to 'master use cases'?

Also - I want to get rid of the address taking up a chunk on the screen but I want the pin to remain. Can you get that? So simple. Maybe leave the last few things pinned.

More generally the ability to have 'default' filters for the kinds of things you show and don't that are perhaps relevant to what I'm looking for.

So many nuanced rough edges, I feel you're going to have to spend some time in the field and spend time with users in a very, very detailed way to capture these little things to take it to the next level.

WRT the metro issue, have you tried switching the map into "Transit" view? Hit the information (ⓘ) icon and select "Transit" under map settings. That shows all the transit lines & stops.

As you zoom out, the subway lines do disappear, but are replaced with national rail lines, and then keep zooming out and it shifts to showing major international rail terminals.

It doesn't hide all of the other stuff shown on the map, but it does effectively highlight each transit line, so it's easy to find the closest line and then scan it for nearby stations.

That's great, thanks for that ...

... but in regular map view, metro stations should all be visible on the same zoom level and beyond. Not this whack-a-mole thing of zooming in and out to find stations. No settings should be needed there.

I have the same issue with Apple maps (chicago). If we (tech community) can't figure this out or its a painful UI for us; what hope does Jane Doe have in middle america? Google makes it super easy to find and navigate our train system.

How does Google make it easy to find and navigate the train system?

Don't most people look for directions from a to b, by a certain mode? I've extensively used both Google and Apple maps for this and found very little difference between the two when doing this. I tend to use Google more when traveling because it supports more cities, but when I use Apple Maps in a supported city, I find it tends to give more useful information (like what line to catch, or how many stops) easier.

I live 2 hours south of Chicago, and am planning my first trip there (as a destination). I just set Apple Maps to ‘Transit’ mode and the overlays look useful. I will know after my trip.

I think this is a critical area where Google has been making some headway.

They are more and more moving to a map of points of interests (instead of a map of roads) and this tailors my use cases so much better.

I found it odd during Turn By Turn nav that google told me to "Take a right after the Taco Bell."

Navigating by landmark is natural for humans, and it's cool to see Google moving to this approach.

My wife and I traveled to roughly the same area, and solely based on that one instruction we were able to go by memory, because of this new approach to nav that Google Maps is taking.

For a different perspective, I hate navigation by landmarks. I basically never pay attention to the names of stores I’m passing.

places close down (and don’t get updated in maps) much more regularly than street name change. if it were extra it might be good?

That's a good point.

Google is well positioned to support it--between their business information + data from Android devices, detecting the closed places wouldn't be intractable.

> If Apple staff are reading this - please fix this ridiculous issue - the fact metro stations show up at arbitrary levels of zoom. Zome show up at level x, some show at x+1, and some dissapear at x+1, meaning at many levels, you see some, not others.

If you really want it fixed, give some proper examples with pictures.

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