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Google Maps Gets a New Look
- goerz 9y agoFor the love of god, PLEASE include a scale. It's not a map if it doesn't have a scale (and not just when zooming). Looks nice otherwise!
- com2kid 9y agoI hope it actually starts showing street names when zooming in. When using Google Maps for pedestrian navigation, having street names show up rather arbitrarily can be a huge problem, I've had times when I was unable to find out what street I was on due to visual design overriding usability concerns. This is most applicable in cities that don't feel the need to place street signs all that often, which is another issue altogether!
- cromwellian 9y agoAll electronic maps use heuristics to show street names because otherwise the map would be too visually cluttered. They tend to show the major streets and a few non major ones and change based on zoom level. I mean for you use case they should perhaps have a subtitle which is “currently on street X” but I definitely don’t want my maps cluttered with overfitting this concern and jam packing it.
- smelendez 9y agoNot OP but I wish you could at least easily tap a street to see its name, or quickly toggle to show all street names even if it makes the map ugly.
- ucaetano 9y agoWhich would mean adding yet another toggle for showing all street names, or adding touch points on every street for showing the name. All of that would easily overload the user interface. I'd guess that the team probably took all of that in consideration, and the "I need to know every street name" use case was too rare to justify cluttering the small screen with names.
- edgarvaldes 9y agoI think the solution is simply to show the street name when the zoom is at certain level. In that case, there is no clutter.
- euyyn 9y agoThe problem is, sometimes not even zooming in enough that only one street fills the screen, its name will be displayed. Of course no one's asking for all street names to be displayed while zoomed out.
- ryandrake 9y agoI've worked on more than my share of mapping systems in my life (disclaimer: I have not worked on Google Maps). The behavior you describe could very well be explained as follows: Many map data sets store, along with the geometry for the roads and points of interest, pre-baked positions at which the street names may be rendered. The map will never render a street name (or highway number) in a place other than where these candidate points are. In order to de-clutter, the mapping system simply selectively turns on or off these labels--it is not smart enough to move them around. So what you are likely seeing is: You zoomed into a stretch of road where no pre-baked candidate positions for the street name exist.
- smelendez 9y agoThis is really annoying and occasionally dangerous (if you're in an situation where you don't to look lost or have your phone out longer than you need to). The other thing I find really annoying is that you can't touch landmarks for more information while in navigation mode. A lot of times I'm on a long walk and want to know if it's worth detouring for a business that's a few blocks off the route, and the only way I've found to do so is exiting navigation mode, clicking, then re-entering my destination.
- kin 9y agoOh my god I went into the comments section to post exactly this! It makes me curious how they determine when to show a street name. Honestly, all I want is at all times the center of my screen should show its street name. That's it. Sometimes I find myself zooming in and out of the very center of my screen and it refuses to show the street. Instead it shows the names of nearby streets I don't care about. Sometimes I'm on the damn street and I just want to know what street I'm currently on. It really does feel arbitrary.
- cryptoz 9y agoThis happens in the real world frustratingly often too. Many cities will have huge streets that intersect each other, and at that intersection, there will be no signs. No street signs at all to tell you what intersection you're at, despite being at perhaps the largest and most used intersection in the city. It's infuriating.
- zodPod 9y agoIt's especially awful when people try to give directions based on crossroads and stuff. "Drive on Main until you get to water street then turn." then water street isn't marked. or "It's at the crossroads of 46th and main" then 46th isn't marked so you have to find 43rd and count three streets forward. You'd think that would be one of their base duties.
- InitialLastName 9y agoHudson county, NJ takes that a step further (especially in the West New York/Guttenberg area): E/W streets are numbered, crossed by a dozen or so named N/S Avenues/Boulevards. OK so far. But in some areas there aren't any street signs for those names, just "local" street names (which, by the way, usually aren't visible on maps) in both directions.
- zippergz 9y agoOr if they do have signs, they are positioned up high, easy to see from a car but very hard to see as a pedestrian.
- ken 9y agoI agree that online zoomable maps often have trouble with labeling, but my problem is just as often with too many labels: https://i.imgur.com/Z4FFdzS.png https://i.imgur.com/Z4FFdzS.png
- zootboy 9y agoI'll take that over missing labels any day.
- CamperBob2 9y agoHard to believe we can write programs to defeat 9-dan Go professionals but not to avoid printing "Northlake Way Northlake Way Northlake Way Northlake Way Northlake Way Northlake Way Northlake Way" on a map. I understand that maps are hard. But they are also important.
- latencyloser 9y agoWhen I first lived in Chicago, this was _awful_. Even with Chicago's grid system, Google maps would only show like every 3rd street or something--even when zoomed in as much as possible. Not knowing the city, I'd frequently go the exact _opposite_ way intended because I'd incorrectly remember "oh wells st is between these two..." when in fact it was between the two streets on the opposite side I was headed. I'm pretty decent with directions in general, but this often led to many extra miles being walked.
- kirillseva 9y agothat's google fitness built into google maps
- mirimir 9y agoBoston :(
- pvinis 9y agoI know it's not perfect, but I have found that dropping a pin on a street with no name shown, is a pretty easy way to find out what it's called.
- jpl56 9y agoClever! I will have to try that.
- newscracker 9y agoI struggle to read the names of streets and roads once the route with the blue dots overlays them. I hope this change makes those readable.
- what_ever 9y agoI disagree. Once I am routing somewhere, I only want to see major things that I want to focus on. Like the next exit/turn.
- newscracker 9y agoMy requirement doesn't take away from your needs in any way because my problem is with the color choices, contrast, etc. A good choice of colors, contrast and font sizes can provide for both needs (which it certainly hasn't all this while). When I go around, I usually don't keep the phone on hand or use any navigational aids (for various reasons, including not letting Google know where I am at what times and dates). There are times when I want to map out a walking route or a driving route and just need to memorize some of the street/road names to know how I'm headed. That also helps me later so that I'm not always dependent on a map that's not in my head. There are also many turns around the world's streets where there are no distinguishing landmarks as such. For people who follow the navigation aid all the time, these things don't matter.
- spike021 9y agoAny chance Google Maps for iOS/Android will include a "driving mode" like regular GPS devices have? What I mean by that is a mode for when you don't have an obvious destination entered into the app, but it should still show the street you're driving on, the speedlimit (if enabled) for that street, upcoming cross streets, and maybe possible places of interest? I'd love to have this since sometimes I don't necessarily have a destination set but want to see on a map where I am.
- imglorp 9y agoThe current (L) Android one has it. Go to the side hamburger menu and choose "Start Driving".
- agumonkey 9y agoSecond this, it's been here for a long time already. And I have an "old" moto g3.
- eco 9y agoYeah, it's been there for about two years.
- puzzle 9y agoIt's actually been around even longer, just even more inaccessible. :-) See this video from 2009: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ni4FU8D1-DU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ni4FU8D1-DU and http://googlemobile.blogspot.com/2010/10/car-home-for-android-gets-personal.html http://googlemobile.blogspot.com/2010/10/car-home-for-androi... It's the View Maps option. It was only enabled in Car (dock) mode and it went away along with several other features at the time of the GMM 5.0 (vector/3D) rewrite, unless you had an internal build.
- spike021 9y agoInteresting. iOS definitely doesn't have it, unless it's hidden beyond the first menu.
- revelation 9y agoI wonder which features were eliminated in this round of redesign. That seems to be the theme lately.
- peterwwillis 9y agoCame here to post this. Every new overhaul of every product for the past two years seems to have removed useful features.
- lemoncucumber 9y agoIs it just me, or does the new version look closer to Apple Maps? For example, the color coded icons for different places is something Apple Maps has had for awhile. I'm not saying this is a bad thing -- obviously Apple Maps would never have existed without taking a lot of ideas from Google Maps. I'm just surprised that it's going the other way too now (which is a win for users).
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- hobofan 9y agoIs it just me or are the changes really only miniscule, compared to other stuff the just added via updates over the last year? I don't really see how this warrants a blog post with such an important sounding title.
- floatrock 9y agoLocalization of the iconography is pretty neat -- the Entertainment / Leisure category has a castle for "Historic" but a gateway-templey thing for the "Historic (China)". A whole bunch of Japan-specific ones too. The Buddhist temple is a swastica, but the thousand-year-old unity-of-life kind, not the rotated-45-degrees hitler kind.
- cyeb 9y agoThere was an excellent article on how the designs of Google Maps has dramatically changed from 2016 to 2017. Screenshots were gathered every month, and the trend across months was pretty telling of a shifting emphasis from roads to places. The same was done for Apple Maps, which, for the most part, hadn't changed. https://www.justinobeirne.com/a-year-of-google-maps-and-apple-maps https://www.justinobeirne.com/a-year-of-google-maps-and-appl...
- dwyerm 9y agoThe colorblind community is not impressed with the new set of colors. They appear to be coupling the colors with reasonably clear symbols, so it might not be too bad. Still, if you're trying to communicate data through color, you can't use that many of them and they really shouldn't be pastel. https://www.reddit.com/r/ColorBlind/comments/7d8gc0/new_google_maps_colors/ https://www.reddit.com/r/ColorBlind/comments/7d8gc0/new_goog...
- eiji 9y agoWould be nice to see the referenced picture adjusted for various levels of color blindness.
- danaliv 9y agoHere's one. https://imgur.com/a/Z5jwl https://imgur.com/a/Z5jwl
- linkregister 9y agoIs that a joke? The two are indistinguishable to me.
- joshuamorton 9y agoNo, they're quite different. Use a color picker for proof.
- dbbk 9y agoWait, the two images side by side are the same to you? They are very different.
- danaliv 9y agoYou might want to get your color vision checked!
- devb 9y agoGood simulation, I guess...
- gerash 9y agoI'd love to be able to make a phone call to the destination when I'm inside navigation mode. That'd be really handy.
- narvind 9y agoonly when walking right?
- CamperBob2 9y agoNo, when I judge that it's safe and appropriate to do so.
- agumonkey 9y agoThe latest changes are a bit crufty on normal screen sizes. Vertical panning on a bottom menu is meh.
- narvind 9y agoAll that Japan love!
- Numberwang 9y agoIM on mobile and can’t for the world of me see the images on that blog in a reasonable size. They ought to hire a web design consultant to help them out.
- newscracker 9y agoI had the same issue. Tried zooming in and tapping the images to see a larger view, but there was no way to see things clearly.
- ChuckMcM 9y agoThey would really benefit by reading "Visualization Analysis & Design" by Munzer. If they had they would not have picked that set of colors :-). But poor color choices aside there is a lot to be said for 'modes'.
- quexy 9y agoPretty please add support for Apple Carplay!
- Gaelan 9y agoDid Apple ever make the CarPlay API public? If not, Google is very unlikely to gain access.
- fludlight 9y agoYes: https://developer.apple.com/carplay/ https://developer.apple.com/carplay/ https://developer.apple.com/documentation/sirikit/carplay https://developer.apple.com/documentation/sirikit/carplay
- Gaelan 9y agoLooks like that's limited to a few categories; as far as I can tell through that document, only "automaker" apps can even build custom UI, and Google's not an automaker.
- megaman22 9y agoIt almost looks like they've gotten rid of that annoying rotate feature, where you get out of having up be north, the way it's supposed to be, when it misinterprets your pinching zoom-in gestures.
- ProAm 9y agoI wish we could change how often it talks to you. Seriously sometimes it speaks to me 7 times for the same upcoming turn. Ends up being like 15 -20 seconds of straight talking. If I could turn down verbosity to once every direction change I'd be very happy.
- suavesav 9y agoI think Google should change the Swastika that represents Buddhist Temples to face right instead of left. Its a small change that would go a long way. They are both correct, but the right facing one is more politically correct, and arguably more correct generally.
- JungleGymSam 9y agoI think you have that backwards. It's correct the way they have it now. The Nazis showed it the other way.
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- kraig911 9y agoCurious is the representation of a lot of religions but not a cross present? https://imgur.com/a/kJzG4 https://imgur.com/a/kJzG4
- JungleGymSam 9y agoYep. Very telling.
- scrumper 9y agoI saw that. Quite odd. Do they not have the data to be able to say definitively, "This is a Christian house of worship"? Seems unlikely?
- kraig911 9y agoTo me more telling was the swastika is there but not a cross.
- kadal 9y agoUgh, just hope it doesn't spark another "war against christianity" thing
- kraig911 9y agoIt will probably will. It's too bad too because this is one of those things that's easy to rectify.
- porfirium 9y agoSo if they don't rectify it, it's because there's intent.
- kraig911 9y agoNot sure. Just saying it's easy to add a cross and be truly and not leave the question of bias out there. This is becoming a mountain out of a molehill thing though. I just don't want Google villified by you know whos.
- JungleGymSam 9y agoThey hate Christianity so much they used a building for the icon unlike every other religion represented. They're so triggered they couldn't stand to use the cross.
- muro 9y agoHeh, was just looking at the same thing. The only church or temple without an associated religion :)
- CamperBob2 9y agoThey hate color-blind people just as much, it seems. Occam's Razor suggests that, as usual, Google is not assigning their best and brightest to the Maps product.
- r00fus 9y agoMaybe they should just remove all the religious symbols. In most places in the US you'd see a whole lot of crosses otherwise (lots of churches everywhere).
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- chewz 9y agoI am riding motobike in mountains in Thailand. Right now like every year in winter. When I stop to check the road I am blinded by the sun, I take off my raybans, my iPhone screen brightness is at full and in Google Maps the country road are thin white on bright yellow. Impossible to see anything. Why don’t they offer alternative color pallete? I also hate that you cannot lock the screen orientation and it turns accidentally like living snake. And when I am looking at something on the other side of the world and suddenly the map jumps right back to my current location. Again no option to switch off these annoying features. I wonder if they ever field test Maps or are they making those dumb user interface decisions in nice, dark, AC meeting rooms in an office in California?
- maxerickson 9y agoThere's a variety of apps that use OpenStreetMap data that you could take a look at. They tend to have more options than mainstream apps. I think on i-devices Maps.Me is the most popular, but there are others, some aimed at niche uses. I guess the first thing would be to check how OpenStreetMap does in the areas you need a map. In many areas it is less complete than Google, but there are also areas where Google doesn't care and there are people actively working on OSM.
- chewz 9y agoThank you but in foreign country Google Maps with their rich content, recommendations etc. is indispensable. My point was rather that I would expect more then armchair design from them.
- twic 9y agoWhile in Paris, I noticed that Google Maps translates metro stop names. At one point it was suggesting I take a train from Vincennes Castle to Town Hall. Given that these names are not what are shown on station signs, metro maps, stop indicators, or anything else, this is entirely unhelpful, and is a frankly bizarre feature to have added.
- wdr1 9y agoWhen will it come to Car Play?