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Comment by 48snickers | Hacker News Reader

This is the opposite of a map. A map helps you build a mental model for how you navigate space by showing you a broad view of the land, potentially enabling you to navigate to anywhere. This offloads the effort of learning, such that you don’t learn to navigate the space yourself, and only gets you from one point to another.

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You are right, but most people want navigational aid, not map. Maps were popular because they were good navigational aid, not because they help building mental model. If better navigational aid becomes available, most people will gladly abandon map's mental model building feature.

Not if you experience the self exploration of the world around you as a fun activity. This map disables mindfulness.

This is not a new thing. Google maps were hard to use as a map (on mobile, but on desktop too due to horrible styling) for a looong time for the purpose you state.

We just snap a photo of a tourist or transit paper map and use that on holidays. Way faster and easier to use for just walking around or planning a non-direct transit route.

Even a basic information like, "will we be walking up a hill" is hard to see on gmaps. Even on terrain overlay, the shading is sloppy an imprecise, and contour lines are a mess (too sparse, and marked too sparsely), no hills are marked with height so it's hard to see what's up/down.

Same location (lol):

https://megous.com/dl/tmp/5e34dc4220021506.png

https://megous.com/dl/tmp/e13a2b0008ba6d0a.png

Google Maps is horrible for use as just a map. I like to use an external Garmin GPS device in my car (with my own custom high-contrast map theme[1]) because it works so well as a HUD map. I rarely set a route, but I frequently refer to it while driving, and as a result I get to know the roads I drive on quite quickly. One of my favourite features is the blue line it paints on the map behind you, which makes it easy to orient yourself when driving in a place you've already been.

[1]: For some reason, both Google Maps and Apple Maps have terrible contrast, to the point where they're completely unusable for me in dark mode, especially while driving. Apple Carplay is useless to me for this reason. Garmin's default map theme is pretty decent, but they actually let you change map themes, and load custom ones if you're so inclined. So I made the street lines bright and bold, with high-contrast keylines. It's an absolute joy to use now.

Disagree. A navigational aid such as Google Maps is only good as long as you know your exact destination in advance. If for some reason you can't, or you need to orient yourself in an area, or even understand the route you're on, or - God forbid - plan a trip involving multiple destinations - Google Maps is incredibly hard to use.

I'm not quite sure what you mean; I've been quite happy with Google Maps's support for multiple stops. And as for the other thing: "If you don't know where you are going, any road will get you there".

What I mean is, it's nice if you input the exact location or locations that you want to visit. It sucks when you're trying to plan a trip - exploring what's in the area, possible routes there. At that stage, you may not have any concrete stop in mind, you're just trying to tentatively evaluate options. Google Map's interface makes this task very hard. It also sucks when you're trying to orient yourself - i.e. understand what the map shows in relation to where you stand. In particular, the way it goes out of its way to hide street names is very annoying.

The latter two use cases are exactly what a map is supposed to be for. Hence, Google Maps suck at being a map.

Exactly! Using GPS etc to navigate actively inhibits your ability to learn to navigate yourself. A friend of mine got a car with satnav built in years ago. After living in the same city for more than a decade he still can't get around without it.

Exactly, I feel the title should be more "Redefining what Google Maps® can be with new information". And as you noted, this app is not really a map.

Regardless of the semantic shift that there is probably no way to stop now, I'm hoping real maps will still be around, they are the best tool to give you spacial awareness at different scales.

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