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Comment by sd9 | Hacker News Reader

This is a really good proof of concept. I would use this.

Something about the moment of the turn itself isn’t working for me though. Just before the turn you have essentially no information about the route ahead, until after the turn is completed. This would make a sequence of consecutive turns difficult to navigate.

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This is exactly why on traditional gps maps I prefer it to be very very zoomed out. It's far too common that mapping tools make something like a sudden second turn invisible to you until it is too late to switch lanes.

I find that Apple Maps is typically pretty smart with its automatic zoom. For a typical intersection with just one turn to navigate, it will zoom in to give you a good sense of the lanes, stop signs/lights, etc. But when there are consecutive turns to navigate, or a heavily curved section of road (like highway on-ramps) it will zoom out and even rotate the map to show that upcoming context.

Apple Maps got really good at some point! I once pick it by accident for navigation, and never went back to Google Maps.

I think it may depend on where you are.

Around here (Long Island, NY), it's far better than Google Maps, and I use it all the time.

I've heard that it falls down, in rural areas, though.

I've used it almost exclusively since around 2019, but that has been in the Bay Area and LA area where the data has presumably been very good relative to other areas.

A few years ago I saw Apple Maps get things wrong in Cupertino!

I uninstalled Google Maps when it started draining my iPhone battery at an absurd rate. Apple Maps it is.

It’s unusable in Sydney, Australia.

It might be fine for pure navigation to addresses but business addresses and other metadata are often missing or out of date because people only bother to update Google Maps. Also that’s where all the reviews are.

I don’t want to use two different apps for navigation vs finding businesses.

Since the last time I tried, Apple Maps has come down from plotting some 30 petrol stations in the Sydney CBD to 2. There are in fact none.

Apart from needing to copy and paste destination addresses from Google/Google Maps every time I use Apple Maps, it's great.

Doesn't do bike routes at all in my country (Ireland) for some reason.

I have had an occasional problem where a large building ends up blocking my view, but in general it’s very good.

It's also pretty good about stacking up a second turn in the corner banner that shows your next maneuver

I remember for at least a while people would complain about how GPS navigation ruined their sense of the local area. Probably stopped hearing about it because people have just surrendered to the apps, but I think part of the reason is also that by default they were just zoomed in way too close. If you forced them back out a ways, I was actually learning a lot about my local area. Like, there's all these subdivisions around, you know, and from the outside who knows what connects to what, I'm not going to just duck in to a subdivision and physically navigate the streets to see how they're all connected, but driving around with the navigation made it much more clear... when it was zoomed out somewhat.

This is also a problem with Google Maps navigation. It is always showing the perspective looking straight ahead of your current direction, even when you're approaching a sharp turn. Instead, the perspective should be along a vector connecting your current location with the point where the navigation's path crosses the edge of the display, pointing straight up.

That seems very wrong and unintuitive for U-turns.

It does.

Let us embrace this minor imperfection by simply excluding U-turns from this presentation method.

Of course it could still have some maximum allowed rotation threshold.

Having any kind of threshold now makes your idea too complicated to implement, and more importantly, too complicated for mere mortals to understand.

I realize I've been spoiled by finally having the ability to tailor almost anything to my exact personal preference. Related: https://vibingwithai.substack.com/p/software-for-one-how-vib... and the HN discussion, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49096605

So why not use 2D maps, have people lost the ability to read North up maps? I swear ever since paper maps have not been used in cars, people have gotten spatially dumber.

I love north-up maps because I find they give me way better spatial context. My truck’s nav system gives north-up as an option but my phone and my truck map both suffer from the same problem on different axes. My phone sits in its holder vertically, so I have way more north-south context than east-west. The truck screen is landscape, same problem north-south! A square map north-up would be amazing!

Obviously the answer is to get a square phone. One of those foldables?

2D map would work the same way with my proposal. The "north is up" part is the issue for me, I'd like to have the rotation oriented in such a way that (the visible part of the path to) my destination is up.

Took me a while to figure out what you're saying, now I assume you're using the "up is direction of motion"?

I use map view / north is up, which makes it reasonably easy to get he big picture - I encourage everybody to try it :).

>"up is direction of motion"

Yes, this is how it's currently implemented. My proposal is "up is the intersection of the path with the edge of the screen". Here's a mock comparison of the current behavior with my proposal: https://i.imgur.com/AmUnzfS.jpeg (The mocked perspective is wrong because I just cut out and rotated the image, but hopefully you get the idea)

Why? There's no benefit to the first person view part of it at all.

I had similar thoughts, but this is a largely solved problem: even headlights in my Volvo turn as I turn the wheel, and it should be easy to change rendering direction to an "average" of road tangents for the next say 50m (would depend on the speed and would need experimenting to know the best value).

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