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So....shall we talk Maps?
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No way will airplanes with cameras be able to match the resolution of cars with cameras. With Street View you can see house numbers on houses and see what is sitting on the front porch (sometimes even see into windows). Unless Apple duplicates this by launching their own fleet of cars, they will never be able to match this detail level. And even if they do the car thing, it will be years before they hit every small town around the globe like Google already has.
Really hope that Google makes a separate app which includes Street View because I use that ALL THE TIME on the current Maps app to check out where I am going before I go.
I'd like a choice. I don't know what a yard is, at uni, high school and even primary school we used metric because they are used for all scientific formula.
If you asked me how much a lb was, I couldn't tell you.
As an Australian, I would. I've been raised with the metric system and have no concept of what a mile is.
Nor an ounce, pound, foot, yard, quart, gallon, or even temperatures in fahrenheit.
Well some of us are well-versed in both so I really don't care. The option I suppose would be fine for those who want it.
So Apple adding voiced turn by turn directions is a significant functional loss and not being a customer advocate? If Apple had turn by turn directions in iOS5 and then stripped it away in iOS6 I believe people would then be more likely to claim a significant functional loss. And they added other functionality to the iOS6 maps as well that was not there in iOS5. Not to mention it is just in Beta 1 now and hasn't even been released yet.
You mean TomTom, that has been doing it longer than Google, which is what Apple is using?
I know it's a beta, but still. You can't just say "it's a beta, we can have everything messed up!"
Everything isn't messed up? It is working perfectly for some people (maybe some minor bugs) and some others it isn't. That is what a beta is.
Plus most of the stuff it seems like is just the map data. Apple can update the map data and I am 99% sure will update the map data before the final release. They even talk about it in the release notes.
Just about every software company doesn't have the final data in at an early beta stage. When we are programming something and letting our beta testers test it out a lot of our data isn't final, is wrong, is not high quality, and is just there to test things out.
United States is the only developed country without the superior metric system as the official system of unit (although imperial is used informally in some countries, like the UK). I don't think Apple has must choice in implementing the metric system, although its absence highlights its US-centric efforts, not boding well for international users (the quality of maps is also pretty appalling outside of North America).
Adoption of the metric system
actually the satellite maps are better for where I am in the sticks of berkshire, uk, than googles...
The beta release notes do say alot of high res satellite images are not included in the beta. Will most likely see this change by launch in oct (approx)
Google seem to have a bug at the moment with their imagery, but they do have very up to date images. I'm not far from you and I've noticed the same. The image on maps.google.com is several years old. However... in Google Earth on the Mac the same is true, until you enable view historical imagery, then all of a sudden the image is only a few months old. They seem to have a bug where the one they show by default is one of the oldest they have, not the newest.
The UK has a somewhat quirky mix though. For example, for cars we all talk about miles per gallon which is something we know how to compare between cars. Yet most people don't even know what a gallon is, since we have been buying fuel by the litre for decades. In an ideal world we would maybe want miles for long distances and metres for distances less than a quarter of a mile. That corresponds with the marker posts approaching motorway junctions which are metres for example, and metres is all most people use for describing distance. Yards is better than feet though. 250 feet means absolutely nothing to most people without some mental arithmetic. At least yards is a bit closer to metres.
Car systems often get round these issues by having a master country code in the onboard software with customised units for a number of things for each country, rather than just a simple metric/imperial switch. Maybe by the time of the release, the Map app will be doing something similar.
Yeah, road signs are still in imperial in the UK, but we'll see how long that lasts. Most countries except the US have moved to metric signs, including Ireland. The worst is all the inconsistency; on the tube you'll see signs denoting distance in yards, in metres, and sometimes even in minutes.
Anyways, I don't think Apple would be stupid enough to release a final version without a metric option.
Anyways, I don't think Apple would be stupid enough to release a final version without a metric option.
It's cool how you can zoom all the way out in satellite view and look at earth like google earth. Didn't know you could do that, never tried it with google maps.