Under the hood of Google Maps 5.0 for Android | Hacker News Reader

Under the hood of Google Maps 5.0 for Android

googlemobile.blogspot.com

47 pointsabraham26 comments

The new maps are simply amazing. The 3D building with pan and rotate make me feel like I live in the future.

The old mobile maps were frustrating to use. Very data hungry and high latency and with quirky UI bugs. It was very much a translation of the web app meant for desktop use on low latency broadband to a mobile app with only a few tweaks. For example, pinch zooming would work surprisingly, by zooming the low-res tiled image and then effectively translating into a button press to zoom in/out one level, leading to a very frustrating and clunky experience that essentially removed any advantage of using multi-touch gestures over just pressing the zoom in and zoom out buttons.

Google has not only fixed those problems, they've improved the experience several times over. It's fabulous. It's faster, it's responsive, it's seamlessly interactive, it's a pleasure to use.

I totally agree with you about the previous version's shortcomings, but it is a little like "my hovershoes! The fusion drive only lasts for 8 hours!"

You have a frickin map of the earth in your pocket. With a database of all places in the earth and directions to anywhere on the earth.

I mean, holy crap.

Oh, I quite agree, and that alone is one of the major reasons why I finally upgraded to a smartphone this year after resisting for so long.

I just wish my Nexus One had a better touchscreen, or that I could afford a Nexus S. :D

Two fingers down does the tilt. How did you get rotate to work?

Two fingers 180 degrees apart and rotate them in a circle in either direction.

Between this and adding priority inbox to the Android gmail app, Google has given some phenomenal holiday presents. This will be really nice to still be able to access (most of) the maps while on the subway. It'd be great if they gave you the option of always caching certain areas.

Google Maps and Navigation for Android really makes me want an Android phone now. How long until Android actually runs (well) on my iPhone 4?

How long before they push this to canvas in the browsers is my question.

Indeed. These changes were only needed for the mobile version, but they would be very much welcome in the web app version. This version of google maps is superior to the web version in nearly every aspect, it's interesting how innovation often happens in unexpected ways like that.

Probably never. The iPhone lacks the 4 button configuration that's standard on Android phones. It can be made to work, but it will always be a hack.

Also, not to sound like a fanboy, but why would you want Android on your iPhone? I can understand iOS fans' concerns about the UI on Android not being as polished as iOSes, but it seems like if you're going to use Android, using an Android phone just makes sense.

There are rumors that Honeycomb won't need any physical buttons at all...

(the prototype tablet Andy Rubin demoed the other day had on-screen buttons that would rotated with the screen)

Honeycomb has on-screen buttons: http://www.phonedog.com/2010/12/14/honeycomb-does-not-requir...

WRT Android on the iPhone, it's like Linux on a Mac: the hardware is usually higher quality. A 3GS and a Samsung Intercept go for the same price on a 2 year contract, but the Intercept feels like a cheap toy compared to the 3GS.

And, like Linux on a Mac, the drivers will never be just perfect.

I don't know, my 13" MacBook Pro is pretty good driver-wise with Ubuntu: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/MacBookPro7-1/Maverick

Yes, a bit of manual configuration, but it seems to work pretty well.

(Also, I've used quite a few Android phones with incredibly broken default drivers. YMMV)

I run Ubuntu on my MacBook as well, but the camera fails sometimes, the brightness control is wonky, the sleep is hit and miss, etc. Still, what am I going to run? OS X?

the math on this is pretty staggering to me.

360 billion 256 pixel square image tiles is about 21PB! (uncompressed, of course)

http://www.google.com/search?q=(256*256*360000000000)%20byte...

and you know they have multiple copies cached around the world for redundancy/speed.

It's generated on the fly from vectordata. The dataset is huge, but not at all on that scale.

That doesn't make sense to me, the article clearly says "pre-rendered". Maybe they don't render the middle of the ocean tiles beforehand but there would be no reason not to save a tile once it has been rendered.

Article says that cells sent to device prerendered it doesn't say ALL cells prerendered.

Obvoiusly they won't re-render tiles that have no new information since last access, not to mention middle of an ocean or desert.

Right, but there are layers that can't be pre-rendered (satellite) or are probably slow to render (terrain).

It's a great change and a great tool, but:

Am I the only person who thinks the color scheme changes are bad? Subtle, but the greens and yellows are harsher than the pre-rendered versions. Not a defeater: just a tiny, tiny complaint.

I had noticed something was different about the new Maps app but I hadn't paid attention to the details and put it together what was happening. Of course now that they mention it's all vector based it's blatantly obvious when you watch the screen render. Absolutely wonderful.

The new maps are really good, but the readability of the labels, a feature covered on HN quite recently, has suffered as a result of the upgrade.

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