7 ms·
I was in Rome recently, and google maps were basically unusable on EDGE (dsepite pre-downloading the area before the trip). We'd wait a minute (or more) for a t
by megous 7y ago
I was in Rome recently, and google maps were basically unusable on EDGE (dsepite pre-downloading the area before the trip). We'd wait a minute (or more) for a timetable of a bus stop and a route of the bus to be show on the map.
Try planning a route in an unfamiliar area with this slow an UI when you are standing outside and there's no place to sit and rest, and you need to click around on a bunch of stops just to see what busses are going through a stop and where they are heading.
So yes, optimization is still important.
We replaced the glorious and easily iterated and expanded google maps app with a photograph of a public transport map, and we could get an answer of how to get from any A to any B within seconds of looking at the map without typing or searching or waiting for anything.
Which also shows that, sometimes, slow software is less than useless.
- titzer 7y agoI haven't been to Rome in a few years, but aren't the schedules and routes posted on signage so people can still do it the old-fashioned way?
- xchaotic 7y agoWhy were you using EDGE if there’s dense 4G coverage in Rome ?
- pantalaimon 7y agoReplace Rome with the German countryside and you'll still just have EDGE. Sites like Hacker News or https://i.reddit.com https://i.reddit.com are still perfectly usable. In contrast to the 'modern' Reddit UI that that takes a couple of seconds to load even on my home WiFi.
- itronitron 7y agoIt would be nice to have a maps/routing service that could just produce a basic HTML page with text directions from a given point A to another given point B. Bonus points if it also lists the before and after streets at direction changes so people know if they missed a turn. This could be implemented as a proxy to either of the maps apps (Google, Apple, OpenStreetMap)
- stjohnswarts 7y agoold.reddit.com is what you need to be using on your laptop if you're using i.reddit.com on your phone.
- bscphil 7y ago> In contrast to the 'modern' Reddit UI that that takes a couple of seconds to load even on my home WiFi. On my phone it takes about 4-5 seconds to load even on Gbit WiFi. It's so bad I have a conspiracy theory that the pulsing Reddit orb is just on a timer and it's not actually loading anything. More likely it's just horrifically unoptimized I suppose.
- jwcacces 7y ago(not gp) I have T-Mobile service in the USA, and my plan includes free international phone and data, but only at EDGE speeds. I could get a local SIM, but it's rarely worth it if I'm traveling to multiple countries.
- throwawayjava 7y agohttps://fi.google.com https://fi.google.com is great if you travel often.
- catalogia 7y agoShould the answer to that question even matter? Even a 56k modem should be more than sufficient to fetch a few measely bus schedules.
- megous 7y agoDidn't enable it, because 3G is usually fine. But there was lack of 3G in many places.
- thrower123 7y agoGoogle Maps is just horrible on mobile when you aren't on Wifi. I'd like to wireshark it some day to figure out just how many different web requests it is making.
- avip 7y agoYou don't need wireshark - open dev console and observe that any map operation (drag/zoom/draw and anything else) requires an api request to gmaps. You can contrast that with mapbox which seems to have been designed upfront with offline mode in mind.
- lallysingh 7y agoGoogle probably wants the usage data, so they take additional load to handle more requests.
- rabidrat 7y agoOops! Then that's a terrible design.
- kragen 7y agoI've found OSMAnd~ on F-Droid to be a good offline-only alternative, but it certainly has much worse efficiency problems than GMaps.
- delusional 7y agoDo you mean computationally? Because I don't think that's a fair comparison. If you mean UX, then fair enough.
- kragen 7y agoI mean UX. Also though I don't think there's a good excuse for OSMAnd~ to be so computationally intensive.
- ashton314 7y agoI was traveling in Europe for a few months and I didn't care to change my phone plan so I was stuck with 2G speeds the entire time. It gave me a profound appreciation for web applications that load the minimal amount of code/resources/whatnot to display. HN really shines here. :)
- 4AoZqrH2fsk5UB 7y agoI agree with your general point, but in this particular case bandwidth is muddying the waters. 2g tech has less bandwidth dedicated to it now than it did years ago, so your kbps is lower now than it would have been when using 2g in the past.
- schwartzworld 7y agoIs making something fast enough to be usable even considered "optimization" at that point?