"It was intended to compete against or replace Google Maps for iPhone users, but it turned out to be filled with errors and distortions, some of them hilarious

"It was intended to compete against or replace Google Maps for iPhone users, but it turned out to be filled with errors and distortions, some of them hilarious — the Brooklyn Bridge imagery was so twisted it looked like it was collapsing into the East River." It bothers me that the genuine usability issues stemming from some incorrect landmark data at the launch of Apple maps are still confused with eye candy hiccups due to the fact that pixel-perfect automated city reconstruction is a hard computer vision problem. The distortion of the Brooklyn Bridge's imagery when projected onto noisy height-map data had no effect on routing people to their destinations correctly. You'll find countless examples of funny-looking projections, weird shadows, etc. on Google Earth as well simply due to the nature of projecting imagery captured from one viewpoint onto incomplete proxy geometry and viewing from another viewpoint.