The Wikipedia layer has been removed from Google Maps
productforums.google.com
productforums.google.com
If they aren't providing the features that differentiates their services anymore, people will leave them. Just because Google's stuff is free doesn't mean I have to put up with their constant anti-user focus. In fact, that Google products are mostly free makes it that much easier for me to pack up and leave.
Fuck off Google.
I use it for when going to a rural area I'm not familiar with, since Internet and phone signals is still non-existent or very slow in those areas.
They managed to get a lot of things right, which is hard. Now not only do they seem to stop getting it right, they actively remove the good things they had built. That's a very disappointing trend, which I hope can still be reversed.
Hey, this is the internet. We all switched from AltaVista to Google and from MapQuest to Google Maps, and from Yahoo mail to Gmail. If Google sucks, vote with your feet.
It's really no harder than changing a bookmark.
Of course this magical company could go bust, but even if it did, the users would technically be able to migrate to one or more other providers without losing anything, including URLs.
http://forums.thedailywtf.com/forums/t/29472.aspx
Grand Central Astoria Station. :P
Plus, it does has an accuracy circle, at least on my phone. (Android 4.0.3, Maps 7.1.0)
Having not done user tests, I can't prove it's objectively worse, but it is certainly worse for me. They've totally broken my use of starred places. Search is much slower, especially doing a new search to replace the current one. You can no longer leave navigation running while doing a search. The screen where they offer you route options is useless to me; it gives me 1-3 indistinguishable options, and I always just click on the first to see what it's talking about. The menu button frequently doesn't do anything; the search button never does.
I would pay them cash money to give me the old version back.
Not map-related but I find myself saying that every time google throws a pop-up at me on youtube. No, I don't want my gmail and youtube account name to be the same. No, I don't care what changes have been made to channels. I was pissed enough when I was forced to use the same password on Youtube (relatively insecure, I would log in on public computers etc) with my GMail (more secure and I was very selective where I'd access it from). Also, getting to my favorite-ed videos on YT is a royal pain now.
As for maps, I was trying to make a quick map for my job but I don't have access to ArcMaps so I was trying to use the free Google Earth. All I wanted was a nice looking terrain map without sat imagery but apparently they took that option out a few releases back in the free version.
It's a bit shit at the moment (and only has 10% of dbpedia's births, deaths, city foundations and battles at the moment - things with both a time and a place) , but have a play and try not to break my AWS micro instance!
I don't really understand how Google gets away with this sort of thing, I thought it was Software 101 to never remove features. It's sort-of understandable if the feature has very few users, but it sounds like this one is used by quite a lot of people.
However, with Google, we aren't the customers, we're the product. So here the equivalent question is, "Does the Wikipedia layer help the advertisers make sales?"
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Nearby
This is in the site navigation on mobile web and it's accessible on desktop. The official Wikipedia apps also have a nearby feature as well, but I wouldn't recommend you use them to be honest. Our mobile web view is much faster, and allows you edit, upload photos, watch pages, etc.
In other words:
Lets say you remove 100 "niche features".
You have 100,000 users.
Every niche features was used by 0.05% of your users.
Now you have upset 100000 * 0.0005 * 100 = 5000 or 5% of what is likely among your most vocal users.
As someone who inherited an open studios site that did the auto cropping of artist images thing, the first thing I did was get rid of that. I was a minor hero.
Sorry, what are you talking about?
http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/09/balky-carriers-and-sl...
Its quite probable the engineer that built the layer has left (either Google altogether, or just to another team).
As its aged its started misbehaving, and nobody left is interested enough to figure how to fix it. Ultimately its easier just to ditch it than to maintain.
euthanasia rather than murder.
Without this fragmentation would continue to be a huge issue and make Android development much less palatable than the alternatives (iOS/maybe WP). What would you have Google do instead?
Edit: just downloaded the full version, and I can confirm it's a lot better than every other Osm apps I've tried. I'm using a Galaxy S4 by the way
Edit - here is their git repository: https://code.google.com/p/osmand/
Edit: Just tried it now and I can zoom out to the whole of Tokyo (and in fact wider) no problem.
But I'm starting to think it was a fluke, because holy fuck, browsing their "forums" is so painful.
Could you please tell me what you like about it? I have very mixed feelings leaning towards unpleasantness (where the hell is CC and why does it take more than one click?).
I don't know what CC is.
edit: OH, I get it
I like Gmail because of the threaded view. It's old hat nowadays but the fact remains that the threaded view is quite simply leagues better than old-school email inbox views.
I'm not saying it can't be improved, but it's a very good ux. I even like the new compose, once I got used to it.
As for CC... why do you need it? Just add the address to the "To:" field. The result is the same. The only time you need to put it in a different field is for BCCs, and quite frankly I imagine most don't use that feature.
I'm just saying, the original Gmail UI guys were inspired by good email clients. :)
It's true that to a mail server routing the email, yes, the result is the same. That doesn't mean the distinction is pointless, as it carries semantic information useful to the human recipients. The difference between To: and Cc: is the difference between 'I'm talking to you' and 'I'm talking to X, but you can/should listen in (and I want X to know you can listen in)'.
(To be clear, I actually have no problem with the gmail compose window's implementation of cc and bbc - it does only take one click).
Their hierarchy of boards & topics is confusing, too. There are two different types of hierarchy, but why? They are all clickable and filterable, yet they are almost visual opposites of each other [2].
These are just two, to me, glaring things. The UI is also crazy busy for something I would have though Google would have distilled and simplified.
It was great in the beginning indeed, but recent changes are also very disappointing. Well, they didn't touch the mail much yet, but the changes to built-in Google Chat were just bad.
I have got several thousand chat threads over the last six years, with many threads in excess of a thousand lines long - so I've used it quite a lot.
I really didn't like the changes they made as they went from the old GChat to Hangouts:
- probably the worst is that they stopped breaking down the conversation in separate chat sessions: now you get a neverending scroll, so there's no easy way to tell when the yesterday's discussion ends and today's begins;
- what's even worse, this scroll loads in small pieces. Before I could open a 800-lines long conversation and Ctrl+F the words I needed - not anymore, now I'd have to scroll through it all;
- the conversations are still separate in the history, but if I click on one, I get to its end, and actually look at the beginning of the next one. If I want to re-read the conversation from the very beginning, I have to either scroll up or actually select previous conversation. No biggie, but still annoying;
- less text fits in the new chat window;
- there's no timestamp by default now (they only show up on mouseover only).
Okay, now, what DID they add? Hundreds of cartoonish emoticons and user avatars instead of names.
Guys, I'm not a 7-year old, could you please take away that bright plastic rocking horse and give me back the tool that wasn't so shiny, but worked really well?
I'm sure there are better chat clients; but what was really awesome is that GChats were integrated with GMail, so I could search them both at once. That's a great help if you hold half the conversations in emails and another half in a chat - I won't have that with a separate chat client.
But enough ranting. Any pointers for a website/app/service that'd handle chats and email at once, like GMail used to? Preferably online or with a sync option, because having access to your whole history from anywhere is really great.
- what's even worse, this scroll loads in small pieces. Before I could open a 800-lines long conversation and Ctrl+F the words I needed - not anymore, now I'd have to scroll through it all;
- the conversations are still separate in the history, but if I click on one, I get to its end, and actually look at the beginning of the next one. If I want to re-read the conversation from the very beginning, I have to either scroll up or actually select previous conversation. No biggie, but still annoying;
- less text fits in the new chat window;
All of this increases their time-on-page numbers.
No consolation that some other Google products, such as G+, are even worse.
Are you kidding? It fills you with awe? Really?
Critique aside, that's to well worn now, some like it some don't, but what word would you use for child birth, Niagara Falls, the launch of a space rocket, a tsunami, a nuclear explosion, or a cure for cancer?
Don't you think that maybe, just maybe, people use the word "awesome" to describe things that don't literally fill you with awe? Or are you still stuck in that phase of growth where you think you've found enlightenment and feel the need to nitpick everyone around you because you haven't yet grasped that language constructs are mutable?
I mean, I can use it in the literal sense: Your pedantry and sour-puss-ness are awesome. I am in awe of how much of a pedantic sour puss you are.
But then again you might jump on me because sour-puss-ness isn't a word. I'll be sure to go read my Funk & Wagnall's from cover to cover before I post on HN again.
I'm not talking about a come back to the stone age, but I'm sure there are tons of opportunities to do networking with decentralized apps so that users can actually own their data to make it more relevant. Today the internet is completely ruled by big companies, and users can't really decide how the internet should view them.
Furthermore I failed to see any significant improvement from the rewrite. Only annoyances.
Double-tap + drag up to zoom in, double-tap + drag down to zoom out.
Both of these have been in maps for a while, and are a lot better for one-handed use than those Android 1.5-era buttons ever were.
At one point wikimapia was the most popular map built upon the Google Maps API. I'm pretty sure it's why Google introduced a wiki layer themselves to Google Maps.
I've found that Linux machines which run OS's with older kernel versions (CentOS 6.4) seem to have unbearably bad performance - just speculating but I think it's probably due to a lack of hardware acceleration support in the video card drivers. The new Maps uses vector-based instead of tile-based rendering which requires quite a bit more computational power to achieve a nicer look.
Similar things seem to have been happening at OpenStreetMap ... the gradual fade of a certain kinds of detail. Zoom in on a region and see what kind of luck you have identifying bodies of water. (Same problem at Google.) I've had to switch to the MapQuest version for that.
OSM http://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=10/51.3825/-68.5375 (I don't see anything on the St. Lawrence River either...)
Mapquest http://mapq.st/18F1XnO
Looking at LARGE bodies of water away from populated regions, I'm seeing very few labels anywhere.
IIRC before that time GM were thickly populated with WP icons, and that diminished over time.
It's not a Wikipedia layer, but their data sets are interesting. There's a lot more context than the Wikipedia layer because they've organized things into categories. Their international coverage isn't as good as their US coverage, though.
I didn't even know about this layer, but this has tipped the scale for me.
After reader disappearing, trying to change Maps in a way I don't like, pushing G+ everywhere and merging separate products, all the NSA lies, and changing GMail compose, I look forward to supporting non-Google efforts. /rant