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Comment by dustinupdyke | Hacker News Reader

A bit off-topic, but the newest Google maps on the desktop is terrible; a massive step backwards in usability imho.

I suppose they were trying to simplify, but now I can't figure out how to send someone a pin, how to click on a pin, how to find things around a pin, etc.

I gave up and switched to Bing. First for maps, but then for everything, and it doesn't seem like I gave anything up; I guess wasn't as married to a search/map engine as I had previously thought.

I agree with other comments here, that on the phone, Apple maps is certainly "good enough".

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The problem with the new Google Maps is that the interface is quite literally all over the place. Top-left, bottom-left, bottom-right, who the hell knows where anything is.

How do you view transit lines? It took me months to figure out that you could hover over the search box and click the blue Transit link. This is a hugely important feature to me, and it's hidden.

Just in the past few days they did finally add back the little orange peg-man as a Street View interface, which is a big improvement.

> How do you view transit lines? It took me months to figure out that you could hover over the search box and click the blue Transit link. This is a hugely important feature to me, and it's hidden.

To be fair the search box is expanded by default so the transit link is on the screen when you load maps. If you click the map the search box minimizes and you would have to either click it again or hover over.

Yeah it's terrible. One killer feature in the old interface was knowing where you could get a street view or not via the blue shaded areas. Now I have to click all over and wait for a street view option to show up...or not...under the search box. and when I do get a street view a big chunk of screen real estate is taken up with a useless photo reel I will never use, so I have to click "hide imagery" every. singe. time. The "Explore" tab at the bottom is a failure of an idea and I wish I could just disable it, except that's the only way I can get overhead imagery...which has nothing to do with the other random photos that are in the list. terrible

Between that, random crashiness all the time, and the lack of multiple waypoints it's virtually useless to me.

(recently I was planning a road trip with multiple waypoints and needed street view pictures of some of the locations, the new google maps was so absurdly bad for this that I had to switch back to the old interface)

edit I see they've finally brought back the street view blue outlines and they've allowed "explore" to go away without taking away Earth/Maps navigation AND multiple destinations (AT LAST). Now all I have to do is convince them to move the traffic overlay down to the same place as earth/maps so I don't have to hunt around the entire screen. It's better, but not perfect.

Google brought Pegman back. It's in the right bottom corner, near photo icons (photos are useless, I agree). You can grab it and drop wherever you want, like in good old days.

I'm with you regarding Bing as well. First I switched just to separate my searches from my Gmail account through more than just Google's goodwill configuration options. Since I switched, I've gotten at least $100 in free Amazon gift cards through their Bing Rewards program. I too label their search as "good enough".

What I want to know is when I open the new Google maps, how the hell do I enable traffic view? Where is it? The help points to clicking links that I do not see. This is the most important feature to me, I had to revert back to the old maps.

I think it's under one of those annoying expandable boxes on the right.

The new Google Maps on Android is terrible, as well. It's missing features, most notable of which is the ability to search for alternate routes when you hit traffic.

This may be location dependent, but yes alternate rerouting is not in real time, but when you ask for initial directions they give you the options of 3 different routes that do change according to traffic.

Waze is better for both of these use cases. Maybe Google will integrate more of its functionality over time, but for now (though I hate the look and feel) the routing and traffic info make it absolutely worthwhile.

http://www.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/1qdwbq/google_maps_...

this thread is indicating it is doing real time rerouting

I'm not even asking for automatic alternate routing. How about letting me switch to a better route manually, without exiting navigation?

I haven't switched to Bing, yet, but I agree that the new Google Maps is a step backwards. It appears that in an effort to simplify or streamline the interface they've succeeded in making it harder to use.

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