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Apple posted 6 Maps developer jobs in the last 10 days (search maps)
- barista 14y agoNot surprised. If there is one feedback so far about the new iOS6, its that it needs work.
- fruchtose 14y agoUnfortunately, adding more developers has the potential to make the situation worse, not better--especially if six positions are being added simultaneously.
- SG- 14y agoMaybe they got fired and these are the replacements.
- bmeckel 14y agoWell iOS 6 on the whole is pretty decent. It's maps that is a true train-wreck. That being said, it's not suprising that launching a brand new map service is going to be worse than the established one that's had years of feedback and growing pains of its own. Also, this was really the only way for Apple to get that type of feedback, so the actual decision to do so isn't surprising. That doesn't mean I don't want my damn google maps back though.
- adestefan 14y agoI'm not even going to upgrade since I use maps all the damn time.
- piyush_soni 14y agoYeah but "brand new map service" can't be an excuse to drive people in the river or make them fall of the bridge. The product they've launched can at best be called an alpha (not even a beta product) which was a foolish decision by the decision makers IMHO.
- Steko 14y agoWell that train came down the tracks pretty quick. How on earth did they only notice this 10 days ago? If they really wanted to stick it to Google why not just pay Nokia or Bing or someone ahead of whoever they're using. Instead they stuck it to their customers. Full disclosure, maps where I live are fine. That doesn't help me when I travel though.
- rhizome 14y agoMaybe it's a hiring gambit. It's probably the easiest way to find the brightest and most passionate of available people. It's a default app, so ppl will jsut give them the benefit of the doubt while they fix it up and do a little poaching thereby.
- spaghetti 14y agoGood point about the 10 day time frame. Perhaps that's when Google's app was submitted for review?
- Mythbusters 14y agoSeriously. Mapping on Nokia is stunning with offline driving directions and all.... How do the iSheep keep up with such mediocre product?
- shinratdr 14y ago> How do the iSheep keep up with such mediocre product? One feature doesn't make a phone and many people don't want or need offline driving directions? When the hell am I offline and driving? I don't know about anyone else but in Canada, that's your best chance of getting a cell signal in a rural area. Find a road.
- CamperBob2 14y agoWe saw the same thing with Antennagate. On Friday they held the press conference where Jobs fell on his sword. On Monday they posted employment ads for 8 EEs with antenna experience. This is apparently how Apple says "Oops." Who's running the show over there, Horsebolt McStabledoor? (Actually those ads were posted a couple of weeks before the press conference, but they went unremarked-upon until the explanation became obvious.)
- kefs 14y agothey should hire someone to fix that form.
- wildmXranat 14y agoJokes aside, they will need some CSI quality, image enhancement wizardy at the moment. For what it's worth, I wish that they pull it off sooner than later.
- helpbygrace 14y agoThere's verb in Korea. Fix the cowshed after loosing cows.
- est 14y agoIs it 망우보뢰(亡牛補牢)? It's actually Chinese (亡羊补牢 from 戰國策).
- helpbygrace 14y agoThe translation is almost same, however, the meaning is quite different. Chinese 망양보뢰 means that it is not too late to fix the cowshed after lost. Korean, however, shows the useless of the fixing activity. Later connotes the regret. :)
- kaka2 14y agoo(∩∩)o...哈哈
- philwelch 14y agoThere's an English idiom too: to "close the gate after the horse has bolted".
- clarky07 14y agoGood to see they are working on it.
- clarky07 14y agosorry about the multiple posts. I did this on an app and it apparently failed miserably.
- clarky07 14y agoGood to see they are working on it.
- clarky07 14y agoGood to see they are working on it.
- clarky07 14y agoGood to see they are working on it.
- clarky07 14y agoGood to see they are working on it.
- Splines 14y agoThe Apple Maps team must be under tremendous pressure. I wouldn't be surprised if there's some dysfunction going on in there too, given the variations in quality (e.g., if the 3D is so bad, why didn't they just cut it and introduce it as a shiny update when it's ready?) Someone at Apple is probably kicking themselves because they didn't start on this initiative a few years earlier.
- ajross 14y agoI don't know that I buy that. Development efforts have trouble all the time, no doubt even inside Apple. The problem here isn't that maps was late, it's that someone decided to pull the trigger and ship it when it wasn't ready. That's not something that can be put on the development group. Pulling out the dead guy card again: one generally would assume that Jobs would have been using this thing and playing with it to be sure it was ready. Did Cook? Or if not, whose job was it and why didn't it happen?
- kkowalczyk 14y agoIt seems that Apple painted itself into a corner here. Apple releases a new iPhone every year and it comes with major-ish OS update. They can't just not ship and wait until it's perfect - there's too much money riding on this upgrade cycle. At the same time, Apple dropped contract with Google way before iOS 6 was ready. Since delaying iPhone 5/iOS 6 combo was out of the question and they didn't prepare for the plan B (i.e. shipping Google's maps) their only option was to ship their maps regardless of how shitty they are.
- hadem 14y ago"The Maps application is used by millions of customers and it's the best mapping program on any mobile platform." Pretty bold to say "the best mapping program on any mobile platform".
- spaghetti 14y agoI noticed that too. Some of the issues can be fixed over time. But how is Apple going to match street view? Start their own fleet of cars driving around the city? I just tried street view (iOS 5) on iPhone and iPad and it's really awesome. So yeah claiming "the best mapping platform on any mobile platform" is BS.
- ChuckMcM 14y agoRemember this is a company with billions of dollars in the bank, and collecting street imagery is a very parallelizable task. Lets do some basic math. Lets say you pay a driver $10/hr to drive 8 hrs a day at an average speed of 35mph in the city. That is about 250 miles covered per driver, per day and $80. So you do that for 10 days and that is 2,500 miles for $800. Now you build 10,000 cars with street view like capabilities, call it $40,000 per car, perhaps you get a car maker to help you perhaps not. that is 400M$ for cars, and 10,000 drivers is $8M for 10 days and 250 million miles. You haven't even spent close to a billion dollars and you've got street view like imagery for every major city on the planet in 10 days. Run this program for a year and you cover every road twice with your 10,000 drivers. Its certainly doable by Apple if they choose to go that route.
- spaghetti 14y agoIt would be kinda neat to have Apple and Google street view mobiles going around and pseudo-competing with each other. Apple has the money to do it no question. However it takes more than just money. On the data collection side there's designing, building and integrating the sensor system on the car. That has to be tested. Then it needs to be replicated many times. The data collected needs to be stored somewhere. Either locally on the car or in the cloud. Either way that has to be figured out. You need to hire drivers, protect yourself from liability etc. While all of the these pieces are doable they're non-trivial. Especially when you consider the number of people involved. And that's just collecting the data. Now Apple has to process the data and make that available to the maps app. And there needs to be software written for the maps mobile apps. Perhaps desktop too. All that needs to be tested. This "presentation" side of the problem involves a bunch of people too. So how long do you think it takes a company the size of Apple to accomplish all that? I'd set a lower bound of one year. So for 12 months Google maps still has street view over Apple and will probably improve it (especially if they know Apple is creating a competing product). While money isn't an issue the amount of time, energy and other resources required to make a product as refined as Google street view is enormous. Can Apple do it? It probably comes down to leadership. Steve probably could have done it. I wonder if the current leadership can.
- acomjean 14y agoMaps are very iterative. As someone in charge of mapping the 400 or so artists in Somerville Ma, I can say the first couple years we tried google maps, it was decent, yet imperfect. It gets better every year, but there were still some addresses that it put in the wrong place up to last year when it finally got the addresses right. Getting good maps takes a lot of time, it will take years for Apple and they might never be as good as google at it. But competition is good for all as it raises the bar. It seems to have some interesting feature like telling you if a restaurant is open graphically. http://arstechnica.com/apple/2012/09/review-ios-6-gets-the-spit-and-polish-treatment/ http://arstechnica.com/apple/2012/09/review-ios-6-gets-the-s... Amazing how we've become so dependent on mobile maps.
- DigitalSea 14y agoWith a little luck some developers from the Nokia maps team come on board and show Apple how a real maps application is supposed to work.
- PeterisP 14y agoToo little, too late - they don't need 6 developers working for 6 months to improve their map code; they need 600 mappers/data entry guys/data-gathering car drivers for a few years to improve their map data instead.
- willrobinson 14y agoGoogle the Merciful should just send over a few maps people and help them out. What fun is a "thermonuclear war"[1] when it's so one-sided? 1. As declared by Our Man Jobs.
- topbanana 14y agoIt's not the client application that's the root cause of this, it's poor data. It will take more than 6 iOS developers to fix that.
- bobbles 14y agoWell according to TomTom the data is solid, and its the client thats the problem. "TomTom's Lea Armstrong says users' experience is determined by the map it supplies and features added by handset makers and third-party software providers based on "their own vision and needs." In other words, don't blame us." http://www.freep.com/article/20120921/NEWS09/120921012/Did-Apple-iOS-6-take-wrong-turn-with-Maps- http://www.freep.com/article/20120921/NEWS09/120921012/Did-A...
- bluman 14y agoSpeaking as a GIS analyst it looks like a large part of their problems are bad cartography followed by incorrect assumptions or spotty analysis of their vendor's data. I don't see how hiring more programmers will fix those issues.