Comment by aw3c2 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by aw3c2 | Hacker News Reader

a Maps Service that Lives in the Cloud

What does that mean? Honestly, I do not understand it. Name-dropping the "cloud"? Is that meant to be negative or positive? Any big map service is bound to run on multiple redundant machines, isn't that the cloud?

Seeing http://static.here.sc/maps/39568/core/features/intropage/img... I cringe. Measuring distances like that does not work in the field, you can almost never walk in a straight line. Distances must be calculated by appropiate means of travel, eg streets for cars/bicycles or ways and walkable areas for pedestrians. Somewhere at Nokia a team of cartographers must be sobbing into their glasses of beer.

Looking at random places I know, I can debunk their claim of "Most accurate map". OpenStreetMap is more accurate at those. (Anecdote!)

This leads to my next critic. They want people fix/enhance the map data for them. But then it is NOT shared back, only as map image. The data stays with Nokia and you probably cannot even export your own contributions. Same as Google really.

Adding "social" to a map service is a great idea. I was always wondering why none of the big players did that.

The 3D stuff is amazing.

>Measuring distances like that does not work in the field, you can almost never walk in a straight line.

I agree with you on everything but this. It's really useful to have a ballpark walking time estimate in a new city. It gives you a sense of scale. London has similar distance circles on their outdoor maps and it's quite helpful.

But measuring distance over the actually existing possible routes is much more accurate and honest. See these random examples: http://resources.esri.com/help/9.3/arcgisdesktop/com/gp_tool... and http://blog.lib.umn.edu/levin031/transportationist//WalkingM...

Granted, this either needs more processing power server-side or a data model where the network (street, areas, etc) data is actually available on the client machine to calculate it.

edit: http://www.mysociety.org/2006/travel-time-maps/ is a very nice detailed write-up about those maps.

In both examples, concentric circles are a pretty good approximation. Considering that the 15-minute walk area will have high variability due to walking speed and traffic lights, detailed contours just give a false sense of accuracy. Like a bathroom scale that reports your weight to nine digits.

Don't get me wrong, I love travel time maps in the right context. I actually made an interactive travel time map for transit in Toronto. It only works in Chrome but can be found here: http://ttcvis.s3-website-us-east-1.amazonaws.com/

Thanks for the link in the edit, I love write-ups of data visualizations and from a quick skim this looks really interesting.

> Name-dropping the "cloud"?

You must be new around here. :/

Edit: My favorite link of the past few months indicated the percentage of people who believed that bad weather would affect cloud services.

http://www.techspot.com/news/49980-majority-of-americans-bel...

Hey, if you're on Amazon East there's a correlation.

Er, um... you got me there.

Personally I liked their older model - a map and nav service that lived entirely on the handset. You could take the whole world with you, which is very useful in some of the more remote areas (like parts of Australia).

You still can...

uh... good! Is that available on their Win Phones too?

Not that I'm looking at buying nokia any time soon, I only replaced my N900 with a Galaxy Note earlier this year.

One of the big draws of Nokia Maps on Windows Phone is that you can download offline maps of the entire world.

...and on all of the Symbian^3 crowd of phones as well. Quite a lifesaver when travelling around Europe and not wanting to get gouged on roaming data charges.

Yes, Windows Phone 8 has offline maps.

I believe here.net works also in offline mode with HTML5 local storage, at least the old Nokia maps version did. Maybe the 'collections' feature stores the actual data on your phone.

The headline is taken from the article http://www.technologyreview.com/news/507186/nokia-unveils-a-...

I believe by cloud, they mean that the service can be accessed by any device with a browser, removing the necessity for a 'Maps App'.

So... like Google Maps?

Wow, this is going to be one spectacular flop.

Or how to turn something ridiculously simple (go to here.com to get Nokia Maps on your iPhone, since this is probably what Nokia is aiming at here) into an incomprehensible buzzword soup.

The measuring distances thing is not really a big deal in my opinion. Many apps do the same thing. Yelp does a search in this area view, which I've used and thought was a good implementation of searching in a map. Foursquare has a similar feature as well. The distance may not be entirely accurate, but it is good enough, and probably a better UI model.

It would be interesting experiment to implement the distance measurement as "contour lines". Take random points from the map, measure how long it takes to walk there from current point, draw 5min, 10min, 15min etc curves.

Check out http://www.mysociety.org/2006/travel-time-maps/ or http://www.nctcog.org/trans/data/traveltimes/

The mysociety one just got revamped and relaunched recently

http://www.mysociety.org/2012/11/08/mapumental-property-laun...

By using the term 'cloud' I think they're pitching it against traditional sat-nav style apps that require a large up-front map-pack download.

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