Edit: This also reminds me that I'm still upset there is no easy way to have the satellite view on google maps without the 3d info. I've read articles describing how to use the old sat maps but nothing seams to work.
Gallery of the 3 levels => https://imgur.com/a/xPTralG
Edit:
I get it now. Triangles, Chevrons, and whatnot.
The sidebar is required to go to the side menu.
But I spend every day in Maps and it was never obvious to me.
I wanted to screen cap the year ago Maps api layer selector where it was Satellite and Map then with the Map option of terrain.
Edit Edit:
To modeless:
Click something in the sidebar... that revels another sidebar...
Back to UX how am I going to know that clicking "Globe" is a toggle state like a checkbox? (https://i.imgur.com/rvLdzM8.png)
I've been using Google Maps for years, I preach it. These things make me feel like a heathen.
Back to UX how am I going to know that clicking "Globe" is a toggle state like a checkbox? (https://i.imgur.com/rvLdzM8.png)
I've been using Google Maps for years, I preach it. These things make me feel like a heathen.
Why?
Because in 6 months there will be another phone, another product, a redesign, to "freshen up" styles, and everything we expended effort to dig out from even one click (or tap) below the surface is upended, and moved somewhere else, because of territorial pissings and careers behind the curtains.
User Interface experiences actually haven't improved since 1999. It's really just that the best parts of that era have withstood the test of time, and remained constant.
People come in with amnesia and make the same old mistakes over and over again, and we're forced to unlearn and relearn nested menu trees because popularity contests must be won.
Case in point:
> Google still has a minus operator for exclusions, but the plus operator was destroyed in the name of Google+
And just like the headphone jack on iPhones, we’ll never get it back because to admit error is to court liability and damages in the corporate context, and smells like a recall to suits and share holders.
Aside from the low FPS, at 14-15 seconds, when the camera zooms past two skyscrapers on its left, I very quickly noticed (without having to pause the video and examine it) that the the buildings had low-res textures compared to what you would find in a video game or compared to real life. Perhaps this, combined with the low FPS, is what makes the experience so uncomfortable.
But while this may not be good for close-up fast moving shots, it certainly does seem to have useful applications (see 0:27, 0:33, 0:45 in the video).
And it's still very impressive how far our technology has advanced - the first heavier-than-air flight was about 100 years ago, computers are also just decades old, and yet right now we are using algorithms to combine satellite imagery and images taken from the surface (street view) to make a 3D model of our world that is explorable in real time (the Google Maps website has this 3D view feature on it).
It's the fact that they actively degrade the tile content that annoys me.