Be Excellent To Each Other

Or adieu?

Do you mean "wouldn't"?


I'm betting 99% of the time it will be fine (but, as I said earlier, I've not put my hands on it yet). It almost certainly isn't as good as Google Maps (which is fair enough, because it's a lot older), but that doesn't stop it being usable for most people.

Of course, that doesn't really matter because the damage has been done.

Heh, apparently Microsoft have taken the opportunity to punt their Bing Maps app. I've no idea if it's any good, though.

I've looked up about a dozen businesses in my area to get directions to them since iOS 6 shipped. AMaps had none of them, GMaps had them all. I'd say that's a definite drop in usefulness. I've also had it tell me to "bear left" at a roundabout (it meant "take the first exit"), take the third exit when actually it meant the second, and a few other such cockups. All in only about an hour and a half of use.

Does the graphic at the top of the screen still tell you to go the wrong way around the roundabout?

Nope.

Pretty much all of the town I live in is one big blur in the satellite images. It's not a problem for where I live, but I use those quite a bit to see where things are as it fixes it in my mind better than just the map when i'm looking for places in other towns. If my town doesn't have the images then I assume there are lots of places that don't, as I don't live in a backwater in the slightest.

I don't see how that addresses my point; it's the quality of the app that's causing a clusterfuck, not the time it was pushed out. If Apple had waited until the app was ready and then 'sneaked' it out within a minor point update (which was the scenario I was comparing this to) it couldn't have been as big a problem because people wouldn't have been so pissed off by it. Also, fuck it, Apple control the entire kit and kaboodle so what's stopping them having a major announcement for a headline app and releasing it whenever they want? Nothing, of course.



Yeah, I am assuming here they could've just extended everything on the terms they already had. I don't know that's the case, but I also don't know it's not; unless there are further rumours doing the rounds?



Where was Google going to get this confirmation from?

Sorry—meant 'would be'.


Whereabouts? POIs are dreadful, but I'm hearing good things from people in London, Scotland and Bath regarding directions. Gary Marshall said he specifically tried to mess up Maps while reviewing it, yet it performed flawlessly (in the sense of turn-by-turn).


I would have thought Apple snapping up mapping companies would have been a less-than-subtle hint.

I've only got iOS5 autocorrect.

Forget this Maps bullshit. More pertinent to me is that you can now no longer download individual songs from iCloud if you have iTunes Match, or manually delete songs without turning Match off first.

That is shoddy.

Sorry.. messed up on my post can a mod remove please?

There is a Google Earth App that might be a bit better for you?

In summary:

One control freak company is arguing with another control freak company about who has the biggest swinging cock with which to control the users.

Lawyers gonna get rich. Here's Tom with the weather.

Disagree. Can't see anyone getting sued over this.

I would say lawyers have already been working overtime with the negotiations that were going on behind closed doors with Google.

That doesn't have Street View though IIRC?

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-19760978

I'd say that these comments are pretty self-explanatory, particularly when Apple's CEO himself suggests his customers go out and buy other people's map app? Oh dear.

Mr Cook isn't having the best time of it I'd say, what with this and the recent staff pay cut fiasco... Apple are in danger of losing the plot at this rate IMO.

I can't wait for the auto tuned remix of his apology.

79p on iTunes probably as we speak mate... They'll probably be an "iMug" on sale at AppleStore(tm) soon enough as well, with his face and speech bubbled "iApology", in the Nick "I'm so very sorry" Clegg/LibDem mould.

(Unlike the LibDem variant though, it'll probably cost around £200, come with all manner of classy packaging, and various people will claim that other mere non-Apple mugs are shite, leak, don't keep their RainforestAlliance raspberry-yoghurt-camel dung-cheeseplant leaf-frappochino beverages hot and/or don't work in some other respect )

Not unlike NavFree piping up at every junction on the M6 telling me to 'bear right' (or in other words, don't go off at the exit and just carry on along the road you're already on).

As I said earlier today:




Yup. Those five million iPhone sales over a single weekend show that Apple's basically screwed. No, wait.

I'm waiting.

I never noticed this before, but when you pin some websites to the home screen, they have their own iOS logo in the icon rather than a miniature screenshot. Google Maps is one of these. It is now on my home screen.

*shrug #1*

Sorry, didn't mean to repeat what you'd said old chap; I just thought it was interesting to note this from the mainstream media like the BBC, is all.



Indeed. But then, this is a rather unprecedented cock up IMO, so I guess it calls for an unequivocal apology and open admission that third party apps will likely be far better than the lash-up that their customer base has unwittingly signed up to as part of an OS update? Don't get me wrong; at least the guy *has* said sorry - that's to his credit at least. It's still a sorry state of affairs though as far as I'm concerned.



*shrug #2*

Hm. Well, you're the tech guru, not me. Note however that I'm not saying "they're screwed" btw, merely they're in danger of "losing the plot", i.e. sufficiently alienating sufficient numbers of their (largely hipster/fanboi) user base such that they start to drift elsewhere...? I have no axe to grind; I'm no Apple-hater and I've got a 32GB 4S myself. Very nice it is too... in its iOS 5 guise.

But it doesn't seem too far fetched to me to think that, given enough of these type of events, coupled with bad publicity about staff pay or whatever (plus iTunes appears to be near universally *loathed*), that things could well start to go wrong? Apple seemed to have the smart phone market sown up good and proper 2-3 years ago didn't they(?), yet now they're very much in the minority compared to (open architecture) Android stuff. Their tablets are riding high at present, but is it so far fetched to think that the same thing could happen here as well, 2-3 years down the line? I don't think so, personally.

Seriously, where is the true innovation in the iPhone 5 then? What can it do - at great expense - that a much cheaper Samsung Galaxy or similar can't? Where is the true innovation in their other stuff come to that?

Yes. It's like a high res favicon thing. YouTube's mobile site has had this for over two years. It's better than the old app and the new app.

I don't think there is much in the way of true innovation with the iPhone 5. That's why I'm happy to wait another year with my 4. But I don't think anybody claimed otherwise. What you get for your money is a seriously high quality product that - based on my own experience - will last you well over two years and even then won't feel too out of date.

Don't get me wrong though, I'm not interested in ferociously defending and explaining away in the least offensive possible terms every mistake Apple make. Like some people do... Not naming names. Some people. *runs*

Yeah, you can set an icon to do that in the HTML of the web page, so any website can do it. I think I did it for my site too!

To use a tenuous car analogy for Cavey - why buy, say, a Porsche for £60k when you could buy, er, an Impreza for half the price and still have just as much performance? (Ignoring the obvious differences between the cars - they were the first two examples I thought of.)

The answer might be because the Porsche is just a higher quality product. It feels nicer. It has leather. It looks nicer. Resale value. Er... Ah fuck it.

@Cavey: To be fair, I didn't say it here, so no need to apologise. (Really, no need to apologise, even if I had.) I agree that it's a fairly unprecedented cock-up as far as Apple goes—probably even worse than MobileMe, given the more widespread nature of maps usage.


Not really. Apple no longer has a 'largely hipster/fanboi' user base. Apple is now mainstream. I think it's used up a big chunk of brand currency, but this damage can easily enough be repaired. Now, should Apple screw up again like this a couple more times this coming year…


Apple never had the smartphone market sewn up and Android was always likely to grab a big chunk of the market. It's important to note, though, that Android is a whole bunch of companies and a fragmented OS. Additionally, many people aren't really using their Android devices beyond SMS and phone calls, which makes them not terribly appealing for devs, and that cycles round to lots of people really not using them.

I suspect many pundits are still waiting for a repeat of the Windows/Mac thing to happen. I don't doubt Android will remain in the lead, but I suspect Apple will continue with iOS to have a larger share than middle single digits. As for tablets, that's a different market, and the iPad's holding its own there against everything else. Perhaps there will be a shift over the coming year, but it's a tougher market for companies to attack when they're not backed by a carrier willing to subsidise the hardware.


Innovation doesn't have to be magic beans. The innovation in iOS at the start was effectively in doing something wildly different from the default position, by taking ideas that already existed and doing them properly. Since then, Apple's been on a path of iteration. The iPhone 5 doesn't need to glue on all kinds of crap, just to say LOOK WHAT WE DID FIRST! Instead, it's honing something that was already very good. As for costs, I'm not sure how much you save in terms of total cost of ownership with a Galaxy, so I can't comment on that. On tablets, there's nothing equivalent that's anywhere near as good and significantly cheaper.

In general, I guess you could probably get something broadly the same for less money, but that's the same everywhere. A guitar from Argos will enable you to strum through an amp, but wouldn't you rather have the quality and craftsmanship of a Strat?


Yeah, it's done by dropping apple-touch-icon.png in the root. When you save a bookmark to a home screen, the PNG will override the screen grab of the site.

Well I suppose an apology from Apple is progress of sorts, Jobs would just have told us we were looking at it wrong.

My post was clearly just a jokey reference to the 'don't hold it that way' comment from Jobs, but feel free to apply rigorous scientific accuracy standards to it.

Don't be silly man, there's no room for humour in these things.

Blog post automatically irrelevant because it has the word "company" in the very first sentence three fucking times and obviously hasn't been proofed.

I believe Beex does.

Most of them are 'non-apologies' anyway.

Street View added to the iOS web app for anyone jonesing for it.

Apple maps blamed for almost killing people ?

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13579_3-57558 ... r-rescues/

I saw that. I'm not entirely sure what to think.

Stupid people do stupid stuff and you can't legislate for that, but it is pretty bad they are being directly led into possible harms way.

Yeah, using a map to find their way around, fucking idiots.

I think anyone selling a map which is shit and hopeless should probably make that pretty clear.

MrsA's parents really struggle with modern navigation aids. They own a satnav, which isn't trusted as "it always tries to send us on the motorways" and "it tells me to turn left but there isn't a road there", so that gets ignored. The nadir was a trip from Great Yarmouth to Buxton. Googlemaps suggests the A14, M1 route (the route I'd use) taking four and a half hours. It took them eight and a half hours, due to arguing with it, then ignoring it. Despite having done that trip countless times in the past. I think that the increasing reliance on these electronic aids, and the ability to travel large distances on a whim, has led to a downturn in knowledge. previously, people would by maps and stuff, now they just punch the intructions in, and trust the amchine over their judgement. I'm guilty of this, too. I borrowed kern's satnav when I was last in France. I didn't need it, as the route I had to take was the Route Nationales (no tolls, see) from Calias to Rouens, to Caen to Domfront, then look at the bit of paper which told me how to reach the gite. (This is how i navigated on my bike, write the names of the towns down on the tank in marker pen, then swear when you spill petrol over it 130 miles down the). All was going fine, until a slight wrong turn in Rouen, and MrsA was insistent on using the satnav and there was then 3 hours of unadultered hell trip through the back lanes as she'd managed to press "shortest route", and it was only by my ignoring her for two thirds of that time did we arrive. She still used her phone even when driving through Bradford, trying to find places, like the pub we went to.

When I taught navigation for the DofE, I told my girls to look at the map, and also use their eyes. Look for signs and pcitures that can correlate to what you think you should bes eeing. None of them ever got lost on Dartmoor, even in the fog.

Sat Navs are joyless pish anyway. They only really make life easier once you need to navigate the streets of a strange town.

Advantages of a road atlas:
Cheap to buy.
Cheap to update.
Incredible battery life.
No annoying computery voice.
Know more about where you are & what's within several miles of you.
Change journeys on a whim.
Helps you figure out which of your companions is dead weight & you should eat first if you get really lost.
Meet new people.
Adventures!
Divorce!

Neutral:
You'll quickly realise that due to the incredible invention known as road signs you don't need one for most journeys.
Takes about the same amount of time to work out how to get from Ullapool to Llanfairpwllgwyngyll as it does typing it on a touch screen.

Disadvantages:
Bulky.
No backlight.
Your co-driver might be a mong.
You might be a mong!
Divorce!

Sat Nav does postcodes. That's a winner.

It was only a matter of time before Apple's new maps killed someone, I was predicting this back in September and was told I was over-reacting.

The real benefit of a satnav for me during those critical last few hundred yards in a new town when you know the turning is near but due to travelling alone have nobody keeping an eye on the street names whilst you concentrate on the traffic.

That and the speedo, obviously.

I'm with Davpaz. Type in postcode, go where you're told. No journey prep required whatsoever.

If you don't do anything else, checking a turning on Streetview before setting off is another time saver.