Good bye, Google Maps… thanks for all the fish
plus.google.com
plus.google.com
>Good bye, Google Maps… thanks for all the fish (google.com)
is simply misleading.
I wish people would stop blogging on Google plus. Period.
It's the worst reading experience ever on the iPhone - nearly impossible as the text blurs, and you have to drag the article around to see it all and then wait for the blur to go away.
On Android, when I click one of these links it opens the app and the reading experience is very pleasant. Maybe I've just been spoiled, but I find the experience to be pretty good.
Edit: Also, I think it's kind of silly that you wish people would stop publicly posting on Google Plus due to your phone experience being subpar. I think the problem lies much more with you and your phone than it does with Google Plus as a writing platform.
(On the other hand, Tumblr looks great on mobile, and it doesn't need an app. Facebook, too, is at least readable on their mobile site.)
I was actually going to comment that I find G+ a great experience for these kinds of posts... oh well.
The problem definitely lies with Google Plus as a web app. Whatever they're doing, it's just not a very good experience on a mobile device. Maybe on Android they redirect Google+ pages to their native app, but they don't even offer a way to do that for other platforms even if you have the native app installed (even a simple link on the page that opens it in the native app would be fine). It seems obvious that they're actively trying to promote their own platform over all other reading experiences, which is a radical departure from the ideals of the web that Google has historically cared about.
This is why I think every company should hire B and even a few C+ level talent. Someone has to do the boring details.
Maybe they should start using CSS brain teasers in their interviews, then.
Anyway, building a G+ app doesn't exactly require an extra 30 points of IQ and 5 years of school than making a web page display readable.
I think this is just a common Google problem; when you hire A+
level talent they don't want to spend their time adjusting css
for every platform.
In this case, Google plus as a blog, obviously all the platforms are targets. So the CSS should be adjusted for all the platforms, and that must be part of the specs. If you have A+ talent executing, either it will be done, or they haven't implemented that yet according to their priorities, or there is something more unknown to us.
You are, as the kids say, straight trippin'.
I was mostly asking if iOS had similar functionality, but it appears not.
But no, iPhone doesn't have that functionality.
Also, I thought it relevant to mention here that you can indeed read the post very clearly on the iPhone - but a seeming lack of this feature (Intents) in iOS makes this awkward.
But you're mistaken. I browse the web using a web browser. Even on my iPhone.
(I'm not sure how they're detecting whether that hook is registered or not, though.)
Even just the ability to suppress the error message would be more or less fine.
In my opinion, it's a far more elegant solution than encouraging developers to register pseudo-protocols to use in URLs that also result in very awkward interactions if the app's mobile site tries to redirect to the app and it is not installed. (Then again, this gives users a "choice" (!) of whether to open links or Intents in the mobile app or native app.)
"It's your fault for not using the Google Plus App to view the page" is tantamount to saying, "It's your fault for not using IE6 to view the page."
Nope
On Android, when I click one of these links it opens the app and the reading experience is very pleasant. Maybe I've just been spoiled, but I find the experience to be pretty good.
This doesn't happen for me. I have a Galaxy Nexus with ICS, and I have Google+ installed and linked to my account, and this doesn't work - it opens the post in the browser. Is there some magic fairy dust that needs to be sprinkled into my microusb port for posts to be redirected to the Google+ app?
What's much worse, though, is that Google+ posts actually reliably crash the ICS chrome browser - as in 100% of the time. Whenever anyone posts anything on Google+, I have to open it in Firefox to read it.
Clearly Google needs to work on this.
Edit: Also, I think it's kind of silly that you wish people would stop publicly posting on Google Plus due to your phone experience being subpar. I think the problem lies much more with you and your phone than it does with Google Plus as a writing platform.
This isn't really that different than putting the post behind a paywall or some other inconvenient barrier to your audience. It might be a nice writing platform, but I think it's a pretty lousy reading platform.
If Google can't do simple HTML after all these years, there's something wrong.
At least on the Honeycomb tablet, can't talk about the mobile phones.
However I'm a little worried about stealing what may be Google's content.
In the case of Google+ that's the navigation bar.
Strangely, I could not trigger the issue when I was reading this post on my iPad. Now either Google has figured out the cause and found a workaround or the stars have somehow aligned correctly for it not to happen this time.
Reader parsed it fine and displayed it beautifully.
While trying to do this, however, it just crashed Safari twice. I tried the same on my wife's 3GS, crashed Safari as well trying to read the Google Plus post.
Unfortunately I don't think there's anything we can do about Safari crashing while taking a screenshot at an inopportune time. Perhaps we can try to find someone on HN who works on at Apple?
By the way, Hacker News is fairly unreadable on an iPhone because the text is so small text width so great. I haven't found a mobile interface that allows me to log in and comment.
The following is a screen shot. Do you care to elaborate on what is wrong?
I also don't get any of the blur mentioned when scrolling.
Try the new-in-iOS5 "Reader" button in the URL bar.
Yup, but it's probably the best writing experience for most bloggers, and also people who don't have blogs. Even if you have one with a decent readership, the engagement you get from Google+ is far higher than anything you can get when people need to use RSS and a reader to follow you.
OMG. Google is pulling a reverse-walled-garden.
I wish the same, but for different reason. I can't open Google+ links in office. :(
The Public Suffix List (publicsuffix.org) might be useful for this, although I doubt plus.google.com is listed in there (no same-origin security considerations). It's still the only systematic approach I know of that even remotely addresses the problem you're describing.
You're assuming he's using a device with a mouse. And why not add a simple feature that makes usability better on all platforms? Special case google plus here, just because this is such a common complaint. I've wanted it for a while, too.
I'm amazed that offering up a potential general solution that already exists, or suggesting someone measures their response before jumping at headlines, would result in downvotes here.
I think it's tone and missing the point. Starting a response with protip is a bit condescending, and the point isn't actually about not being able to use the UI to get the desired information, but about how the usability would be improved (for some users at least) by changing how information is presented.
I was just about to write a Chrome extension to do this.
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/category/home
For me it displays as (plus.google.com)
There is. I installed the user script Show Full Domain on Hacker News posts,
http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/121512
mentioned in an earlier Hacker News thread, and it works well. I knew the submitted article was from plus.google.com and was able to anticipate its content accordingly.
(I am running this user script on Chrome.)
1. So many companies really paying nearly list price that it's worth losing the other business.
2. Using different pricing schemes on different customers to figure out what the pain threshold really is, to maximize profit.
3. The sales people have a bad set of incentives, and are too strongly encouraged to try to make sales with low discounts.
4. ?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3392851 – Why (and how) we've switched away from Google Maps (nestoria.co.uk)
While it's the money that's forcing developers to look for alternative mapping solutions, it's also unleashing a wave of interest in open source maps. Those will undoubtedly get better as time passes.
I do believe Google will look back on the decision to start charging for their map products at the levels chosen as a bad one for themselves, but a great one for open source.
Google maps is deceptively simple, in that the javascript library and tiling is a relatively solved problem. Google has the best datasets, and the best large-data know-how in the business, so outsourcing things like an up-to-date transit location and route database is built into that seemingly large cost.
What if you want to offer transit directions from your location to a rental?
Again, sorry if this sounds like I'm poo-poo'ing your effort; that's not my intention. I think there's another side to this story, though.
EDIT: Forgot to mention my own personal white whale. Google's geocoder is far from perfect, but it's the best I've seen. I worked for years with them, and none of the open source geocoders (or expensive ESRI products) could deal with addresses like Google's. Geocoding is like web WYSIWYG editors; they all suck, but some suck less than others. And everyone thinks they can do it better.
See http://3liz.fr/public/osmtransport/index.php?country=France&... and http://öpnvkarte.de/?zoom=12&lat=52.50944&lon=13.393... for examples of OpenStreetMap public transport data in action.
Actually, Google doesn't let you do that either. They have separate licensing agreements with every transit authority, so there is no API access.
You're right on the geocoder, though. The closest I ever found was Yahoo's, but they're still not up to much.
Lulz wht? Google's Geocoder is by far the suckiest of any of the ones I evaluated. I'd highly recommend Bing or Yahoo before Google's geocoder.
Fair enough. No way would I try to make my own map at the beginning of a project.
http://blog.nestoria.co.uk/why-and-how-weve-switched-away-fr...
Then later if you feel like it you can switch to your own tiles
There are plenty of ways to georeference an image. The easiest would be to use something like QGIS or GRASS (both opensource GIS software). You will need existing spatial data to base your (as of now, non-spatial) map on: a shapefile of the state boundaries would work great.
Once you've wrapped your head around georeferencing and the idea of spatial vs nonspatial data, you will probably get more out of the mapsfromscratch tutorial.
You can actually go to Google MapMaker and modify things yourself. I've fixed many things to date. http://www.google.com/mapmaker
> Note: the Geocoding API may only be used in conjunction with a Google map; geocoding results without displaying them on a map is prohibited.
from: http://code.google.com/apis/maps/documentation/geocoding/
So, though the limit is technically lower, it's practically and legally quite the same.
The technology is simplifying the whole process of generating and rendering maps quite a bit - comes with it's trade-offs of course. For those requiring a step or two above a simple basic map yet wish to have more customization over what's in the map tile, it's perfect - processing times are getting less, and the technology is becoming less arcane to understand
Btw, when Google announced it's ridiculous new pricing scheme for Google Maps, I though maybe they actually just wanted to force people to become Google Maps Premier costumers. I mean, no way they really except people to pay that much. So I am really curious if their Premier program is actually less expensive. Did you actually contact Google Sales about it?
We recently had to navigate the Google Maps licensing obstacle course at $work. I tried getting quotes from Bing, but it was just as hard to get a number since we could only go through resellers. In the end we negotiated down a bit and reduced our map usage. But the next go around I'm seriously considering taking some time to investigate doing the maps ourselves. TileMill looks gorgeous!
It can't be too cheap to serve that many views reliably and quickly. OTOH, they are just NYC and they were already doing some things (like geocoding) themselves, while the google maps price included features they would never use (even implicitly, eg the cost of acquiring street data in other countries has to be figured into google's cost structure).
1.) Imagery, 2.) Cost for GEE ($10k I think), and the cost of maintaining your own servers to host it on.
I think it's still cheaper than going over the 20,000 free, but not optimal either.
Anyway, good for google for charging for something. I don't see why it should be free. But it was a blunder to charge this much from the start. It seems like they want to get rid of customers.
What is the format? Can I download the raw data in bulk (preferably for free) for a data mining project?
Open Street Map looks like it only provides 2D building borders while Google has 3D. Google doesn't even provide an API for accessing it.
Bing also only has 2D building boundary data, albeit at a slightly higher level of detail than OSM.
Is there an open source database for the 3D data or is that proprietary Google info? Is OSM the only source for free building boundary data?
The whole thing cost less than one year of the GSA license fee, we can search all of our content (the GSA had a hard limit on the number of documents it would index), and the search results are way better.
the less people using it the better
Maybe google prices is to remove gmaps from everywhere and sell only to premium sites.
If they disappear users are already hooked and will migrate to the premium sites that still have it
By charging high prices for their solutions they end up fostering mom and pop solutions which would otherwise not have a chance.
Damned if they do, damned if they don't.