Google Maps: Bird Mode
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To this day, I still see the floppy disk used to represent "save" even though we haven't used floppy disks for decades now. It's not uncommon to see it used in mobile apps, especially the less UX-obsessed ones you might find on the Android Play Store.
The next time you assign a name or symbol to something, give it some thought. You never know how others will use it.
The fringes of Android Chinese manufacturer mods are a mess.
Google literally lied to the world here, and screwed up the worldview of many millions of people.
[Dashboards originally were wide mud-guards on the front of house drawn wagons, the same feature was fitted to early cars, eg Peugeot 2.]
I guess some hardcore photographers still swap SD cards in and out all the time. An area where wifi and cloud sync seems slow to proliferate.
I have a few cards hiding in some drawers somewhere and some stuck in an old SLR camera I have not turned on in a few years. But I literally have not seen any SD cards for a long time. And floppy disks... :)
It turns out, moving a few gigabytes of data is easier on an SD card, than having to do an iPhone style cloud transfer, especially if you’re shooting in bumfuck nowhere. Also, being able to carry a bunch of cards is handy.
Maybe it’s just a matter of binning, but I find CF cards to be way more reliable.
"And we were about three months late in filing a fictitious business name so I threatened to call the company Apple Computer unless someone suggested a more interesting name by five o'clock that day. Hoping to stimulate creativity. And it stuck. And that's why we're called Apple."
We'll dba AAAAAACC.
BTW, this explains the eternal popularity of Algol, even if they do keep changing the name: C/C++/Java/C#/Fortran-90...
[0] true story from an employer of mine.
Or maybe Sergey did that on purpose to force the teams to make a decision, "don't make me pull this car over" like.
I think the product has never recovered since they migrated off Silverlight :(
Looking at 3d google maps a bit more closely, it does seem they are capturing the sides of buildings that are not visible on the top down image. Still nowhere near the quality of Birds Eye, but I'd be interested in what other image sources they are using besides top down, and how they are captured.
For example, take an airplane and mount two cameras on it, one on each side, angled down at perhaps 45 degrees to capture ground imagery in each direction.
Add a LIDAR device next to each camera to capture a "point cloud" of the same area the camera is imaging.
Now you have photographic images with distance data for each pixel. You can use that to construct a 3D image that can be viewed from various angles.
(Disclosure: I work at an unrelated Alphabet company but have no personal knowledge of any of this, it's just my semi-educated guess.)
However your comment made me think of this awesome article about Google maps and 3d buildings https://www.justinobeirne.com/google-maps-moat
Is anyone else remembering when Bing Maps was REALLY good? It had a 45 degree view of cities that looked insanely good, like Sim City. When you zoomed in too close, it switched to aerial imagery.
And it was all buttery smooth. What happened to that product?
And developers wonder why users "don't like change"...
Bing also allowed OpenStreetMap to use its aerial imagery for tracing. This helped OSM a lot!
Google, on the other hand, asks users to help them with their proprietary data with no compensation.
If your manager brings fun gadgets into your meetings to keep him/herself entertained, your work might not be important to the company.
Larry and Sergey were extremely invested in Google. I don't think that at this point there was a single employee at Google whose work was not important for them. Larry personally signed off on every single hire. And as you can see in this story they got involved in details like what the text on a button is.
We tend to try a new meeting format for retrospectives every few times, because different formats raise different sorts of issues, some go deep, some go wide, variety ensures that the meetings don’t get boring over time and that we cover as much as possible.
We do similar with brainstorming for new projects too. Some brainstorming methods are very design focused or tech focused or user focused, etc. Different types have different results.
Video: https://vimeo.com/41552761
The best way I can describe it is that feeling when kids on the playground are speaking like experts about a videogame you knew about years before anyone. You should be excited they're into stuff you're into, but you just wished they'd give a little credit. :)
I'm talking about things like not properly maintaining a singular Cartesian projection across a mapped space, so it becomes impossible to reproject related data. So people end up having to manually adjust all the related data after a remapping session.
Kilday was a PM and marketing manager at Keyhole, the startup whose product was renamed Google Earth after being acquired.
His book includes stories and details on Google Earth, Google Maps, the huge amounts of $$$$$, and some of the personalities and politics involved (including Bret Taylor, author of the OP tweet thread).
Best quote, and the same thing what I think all day long.
What that tells me, the name was never that important to them, it was just an meeting to show how important they were to each other - yet in real life their poses meant NOTHING.
(As the old saying goes, naming things is hard, and I've personally experienced a lot of bikeshed over it...)
Edit: Looks like another reply correctly pointed that Bing uses this.
Maybe heavily influenced by Google Maps.
I suppose when you're Larry and Sergey, toying with bikeshed product managers can be fun and not actually waste a crap ton of time.
And people are complaining that the new editor in WordPress (Gutenberg) is bad :)
The article you linked is from a FOIA request. CIA's In-Q-Tel was an investor in the Keyhole product, and that Google has continued to receive excluive contracts for Google Maps.
The tweets note that Sergy proposed the name Bird mode, not the CIA, although the article suggests he (and Google) was closely working with CIA and US intelligence agencies. CIA also denied providing details on why/how they solid the In-Q-Tel funded product to Google.
Which is all to say, you should question what Google's doing with Maps and the massive amount of data its mining every moment its on, rather than passing off baseless statements as conspiracy theories.
When I saw the title, I thought a flying UI, like Google Earth VR has[1], had come to Google Maps.
[1] A random flight to street view transition: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4nulHk7Z3mI&t=96
Why didn't they just call it Photo, or Image, or Detail?
Detail: That’s not specific enough. It could refer to everything and anything.
Image and Photo: People do not really use these words to refer to aerial and satellite photography. People might think it’s some kind of photo-mode (referring to actual photos that are somehow placed on the map).
Obviously you would have to test this to be really sure that someone has a problem with these – but to me their problematic nature seems quite obvious.
Realistically it would, however, not really be realistic to test (all) changes like these … so you have to trust me that your intuition in this case is horrible.
I mean, even if you test it the effect of anything you suggested would probably be small – but to me choices like those are what make software really and truly awful.