Google Maps now looks more like Apple Maps
techradar.com
techradar.com
1. https://justcreative.com/why-do-everyones-logo-fonts-look-th...?
Just look at the divide in architecture between houses sold to people, that are actually made to look inviting and high-quality, vs those huge modern buildings in cities that are mostly designed for "prestige" and to show off.
This only happens in markets where there's no real choice. This would never happen for cars for example because people can choose which car they buy. But if a website has a give UI, you can't choose a different one.
While I agree with your conclusion, I think your example is incorrect. Most houses aren't custom builds, they're built on spec. Think McMansions.
These houses use 2x4 framing, guaranteeing that they can't be adequately insulated. They all use double hung windows instead of high performance options, like tilt turn. They have features that no one actually wants like erratic rooflines, great rooms and oddly places veneer bricks. In short: these are bad houses. They optimize for maximizing square footage, resale value in a Keynesian beauty contest, while throwing all liability concerns to the winds.
Contrast this with actual custom contemporary residential architecture. You get features like insulated wall assemblies, large eaves to reduce weathering and summertime thermal gains, roof lines that won't lead to maintenance nightmares and so on.
Outside residential, I think you're spot on. Look at Boston's city hall. No one with affection for humanity would've built such a thing.
Tilt turns have a single seal that runs along the perimeter. When the window closes the gasket gets compressed all around. Double hung windows have more seams and slide.
I had never seen it before and just looked it up, and I find it quite ironic that it could easily be mistaken for an eastern block administration building from the same era.
Trypophobia, the Building
People have also been complaining that cars are all starting to look the same. Car designs tend to use similar structures to meet safety regulations.
This is most noticeable when you look at the design of a concept car vs the actual production version. When an automaker has to bring a concept to market it has to add larger mirrors, larger lights, bigger bumpers to meet standards. The issue is exacerbated by the need to meet standards globally while minimizing production costs.
In this case the automakers don’t have any real choice because of the constraints they’re given. Much like how software trends to sameness once an optimal design has been discovered.
Ah, how much I miss Proxomitron.
Then you can select manual download with version 1067000303 (Not sure if this is the latest version before redesign).
Edit: you will need to remove previous version to downgrade and since you probably can´t uninstall go to apps disable it and then select remove updates.
I suspect the same is true at Google which is both darkly hilarious and very sad.
there are other ways of doing this, but i found this approach interesting.
Go to walmart and get the budget android on sale. Go get a used and beat up iPhone SE.
If you get your stuff to run on those, it'll run fantastically* on the big devices
* Barring device specific bugs.
Edit: Looking at Paris with the updated version on a tablet vs previous one my phone, main axes dot not pop as much. Guess it's not optimized to navigate without gps now ...
For me as well, but I think it is crazy, that it is usually still enabled by default for EVERYONE. I had to calm quite some people, that they did not break their internet accidently for opening dev tools. Now it surely would be nice, if the majority could make use of that button, but the majority ain't devs and so they should not have that option one click away from buttons they do care about, like copy and paste.
Sometimes it's even inconsequent, like you see something, zoom in to look at the streets, zoom out, it's gone... then you can't see it again until you zoom max..
Step 1: Surveil the ever-loving shit out of everyone and everything you can
Step 2: Pimp out (via RTB) anyone wandering by to advertisers who want to take a crack at them
Step 3: Profit
This plays into Step 1. If someone even thinks about going somewhere, Google insists on knowing where. Bitch better have my money!
Not showing the street names is a problem. Filtering out business I know exist and that I know they have is a problem. Bakeries, bars, coffee places, etc. They have them all. But not on the map. And it's not like there is a lot of other content competing for attention when fully zoomed in. I live in the middle of Berlin, not in a freaking desert.
Only when I search for them do they show up. Showing me nothing where I know they have stuff is a choice. A bad one. It's all form over function lately at Google. Lipstick on a pig. And it doesn't even look that good. Hating the bright greens particularly. Fugly as hell. But Apple does it so it must be good. I guess imitation is a form of flattery. Or desperation. Or something. But it's definitely imitation.
It indeed looks like nobody is in charge, as Ian Hickson suggested in the article that was on HN last week when he left Google after 16 years. Indecisiveness and a lack of leadership are on full display here. Nobody calling BS on this is a problem. Leadership allowing this out of the door, or worse, insisting it is released in this form, is a problem. I guess somebody needed their Christmas bonus so they shipped "something" and forced it through. Just speculating here but corporate stupidity tends to work like that. It's not hard to make an educated guess at the multiple levels of mundane stupidity at play here from the outside. Because I've seen it from the inside in other companies.
That's the goal. You're assuming their metrics are tied into being a 'map' or 'useful to end users', but this is Google. Their metrics are 100% focused on ad revenue. They want you to see people who have paid to be included, and they want to force you to rely on their search (which they control) rather than being able to organically find new places.
For example we can imagine that if a user usually uses it on the phone, at night in the city, on foot, often searching for restaurants, it might default to showing more restaurant venues without the user initially searching for it if the user is in the city at night. There's a blog post they made about it several years ago from what I recall it was something like "if you look for fast food it will show other fast food venues"
Maybe I'm just being cynical but my pet conspiracy is that in order to make the map space marketable it needs to get worse first so companies are "encouraged" to pay for the privilege.
It would fit in with Googles business model.
Business wise speaking, it seems that Google is aware that the clock is ticking for several of their offerings. This is even beyond the antitrust case. Microsoft Bing finds stuff that Google doesn't. Something impossible to think a few years ago.
If someone could, that would be very troubling for google.
About 5 years ago Google totally fucked up the colours of smaller roads here in the UK.
Now basically everything except really big roads are white on slightly off white background. It’s just the worst colour combination ever if you don’t have brilliant vision and can’t be that great anyway.
They just don't seem to value a long term and consistent user experience.
Unfortunately I don't have many examples of large orgs being able to escape Conway's law, every larger org I've worked at has this issue.
After 2 decades in tech I definitely feel the incentives are all wrong, what organisations push for the ticking box process of getting promotions is quite disconnected from the needs of users. Given enough time, inevitably, it breaks.
I haven't had a PM for longer than a year or so in a long time. Getting pretty exhausted by the endless cycles of:
1. new PM
2. weeks and weeks of product workshops to define vision/mission/goals
3. teaching the PM how the product works, who are the customers, why it works this way, all the weird business logic cruft
4. PM has a passing knowledge of the product
5. PM decides on a new questionable flashy project after 3-6 months
6. PM gets promotion (or a burnout)
Rinse and repeat.
In a sane environment there should be user problems to solve, real problems and not invented ones, and teams that solve those problems. The PM of a team delivering the best solutions should have an advantage when looking for a promotion, that's fair. Unfortunately that means that they had a brilliant PM and they'll turn it into a maybe mediocre manager one level up and there is no way to climb down the ladder in the same company. Peter's Principle.
Not unlike any other corporations, to be fair.
There's a reason why even Apple chose a similar color scheme.
Note the current style is described in the November 2023 update part-way down.
BTW I'm the only one who still likes the 2013 version the best...?
- at high zooms, AM public transport has lower contrast between roads and the rest than GM which is lower contrast than other AM views
- zoomed out a bit and the contrast is similar. AM shows fewer small streets but more main streets are shown thicker than in GM. AM shows more of certain POIs like stations or landmarks
- zoomed out a bit more and GM shows major roads with higher contrast than AM which doesn’t pick them out so much but shows side streets with hairlines. The green is greener in AM.
- public transport view at this level is so much better in AM. It’s less cluttered (lines are thinner, when trains run along the same route the lines are rendered right next to each other where GM has an ugly amount of space. Both views are omitting useful information at this zoom level (eg stations and interchanges aren’t all marked; it’s reasonable not to name them but AM used to be better I think). AM does a better job of mimicking signage/designs you see on the network (eg if the letter for a line is a coloured circle on a certain background)
- zoomed out a lot and it’s a bit hard for me to describe the difference. AM seems to have a bit more contrast of roads against backgrounds. Roads are grey in both (I vaguely recall AM used to mimic road atlases). AM shows a greater variation of road thicknesses/darkness for more major roads. AM labels roads closer to how they appear on road signs and shows more road labels in ‘driving’ view
- zooming out further and major roads fade to thin blue lines in AM and grey-blue on grey-green in GM. There is more variation in roughness (different terrain) for the green parts in AM.
Using this as an argument _for_ change is user hostile.
These kinds of headlines make me assume the article is not going to bother to give a balanced or researched analysis, but instead just talk about how people are feeling about things, without necessarily quantifying anything.
It's okay to have feelings or opinions, but that's generally pretty useless to other people without some rationalization or justification as to why you have them.
I would have been far more inclined to read an article with a headline like "Google updates its Maps to look more like Apple's at the expense of ease of use".
- talk about the change in a way thats easy to casually observe - then link a few Tweets … - Profit
This article might be better but I’m training myself not to open articles with such titles anymore.
If I went to my boss and I said “people are upset with our product”, he will bemoan me for providing un-actionable information.
If I went to my boss and said “this is why people are unhappy with our product”, then I’m bringing him something potentially useful.
My point is that I have no desire to read an article which from the headline seems to merely tell me “people are upset with something” as just about anything will upset someone.
If your headline indicates you’ll at least attempt to tell me why people are upset with something, that might actually be interesting.
I don't even bother with Google Maps any more. It shows miles on many dialogues when my locale (South Africa) only uses kilometres. Also, I don't know what preference they give to nearby POIs, but it's mostly useless (or random).
Install one of the OpenStreetMaps-based apps like Magic Earth or OSMAnd with offline maps and customisability, and it works well enough.
The reasons are nonsense, at least in my view. For example, suddenly the spacing between control elements is "too small" for mobile devices. It wasn't last month, but it is now. Or the font, or something else that hasn't changed in years. Other search engines (e.g., Bing) report no problems.
More "change for the sake of change", but they want to force other people's stuff to change as well. Google hegemony can't end soon enough...
Some cases where I’ve seen “element too small” must indicate a bug in the browser or the measuring: no scripting, CSS failing to load wouldn’t make it any smaller, and the content is all after the meta viewport declaration (of course). So unless the entire thing is deliberately faked (which seems unlikely), it’s got to be a bug in the browser or measuring.
The good thing is I never got to spot any correlation between SERP and those "reasons".
They aren't forcing you to do anything.
They are simply informing you that they prioritise end user experience and that they will be promoting more usable sites ahead of yours. Because inadequate spacing between control elements is a fundamental user experience issue on mobile.
My first thought was "I can't see shit with this new map" [0].
I also created a comparison between OSM, old map, new map of that section [1].
I wonder if this is Google trying to transfer less vector data per view.
[0] https://www.google.com/maps/place/Berlin-Bezirk+Neuk%C3%B6ll...
I'm unsure which one is better between the middle and the right one. They are probably at the same level. The middle one has some more POIs. The big difference is that all roads have the same color in the map at the right (the new Google Map) so you have to rely only on thickness/thinness of the line to assess the importance of a road and maybe on its label.
Except Hacker News. Go figure.
Because if you're not pretending to do something useful somebody might think that the company doesn't need you anymore. So you have to invent something to do and breaking working stuff just happens.
I also noticed that Google Maps looks like a watercolor now with more white margins around.
The various map providers are now all about the same level of quality and I chose Google Maps because I preferred the color scheme. With this change, Google Maps lost that advantage.