Google doesn't get "it" anymore. People used their products because they were free and provided tons more functionality over the "other" competition (mapquest/yahoo/askjeeves).
If they aren't providing the features that differentiates their services anymore, people will leave them. Just because Google's stuff is free doesn't mean I have to put up with their constant anti-user focus. In fact, that Google products are mostly free makes it that much easier for me to pack up and leave.
Not map-related but I find myself saying that every time google throws a pop-up at me on youtube. No, I don't want my gmail and youtube account name to be the same. No, I don't care what changes have been made to channels. I was pissed enough when I was forced to use the same password on Youtube (relatively insecure, I would log in on public computers etc) with my GMail (more secure and I was very selective where I'd access it from). Also, getting to my favorite-ed videos on YT is a royal pain now.
As for maps, I was trying to make a quick map for my job but I don't have access to ArcMaps so I was trying to use the free Google Earth. All I wanted was a nice looking terrain map without sat imagery but apparently they took that option out a few releases back in the free version.
I wish there were some good competitors. The updated Google Maps for Android really sucks. It is much tougher for me to use than before they minimized the UI and worse, it is untrustworthy since they removed the GPS accuracy circle and have to try to guess the accuracy based on much the pointer sliders around. Can't even tell if you are actually on a block or not now in cities without hoofing it over to an intersection and trying to convince the damn UI to show you a street name by zooming and in out a bunch. Meanwhile I have to switch to Nokia or Apple, I guess, if I want to switch maps for real. OSM is not good enough.
Wow, I really dislike the new Google maps. I must have sent them 10 bug reports on the thing in the first week. And I'm still frustrated with it.
Having not done user tests, I can't prove it's objectively worse, but it is certainly worse for me. They've totally broken my use of starred places. Search is much slower, especially doing a new search to replace the current one. You can no longer leave navigation running while doing a search. The screen where they offer you route options is useless to me; it gives me 1-3 indistinguishable options, and I always just click on the first to see what it's talking about. The menu button frequently doesn't do anything; the search button never does.
I would pay them cash money to give me the old version back.
Well for one they used to always show on the maps... now most of the time they don't. It used to also be easier to load an address close to where pub wanted to navigate and select what is near here... that option is gone, so it is harder to navigate somewhere now when you know where you want to go, but don't have the actual address. Stared places have you the option of having a location already selected, but now it is very inconsistent.
This over a map layer? The quality, breadth and accessibility of the data Google maps provides is the reason I keep using it. What else is there? Apple Maps?
Hey, this is the internet. We all switched from AltaVista to Google and from MapQuest to Google Maps, and from Yahoo mail to Gmail. If Google sucks, vote with your feet.
When changing mail providers (I chose Fastmail) I made sure to pick a service that would let me use my own domain. I now "own" my email address, so in the future switching will be even easier. I suggest others do the same.
This is great for the few like us that enjoy having a personal domain, but most people don't which is very unfortunate. It's very-painful for most people to migrate email providers.
I wonder if there's a business opportunity there: make it easy to own a personal domain name and use it with various other services. So instead of having to monkey with MX records for mail, you just say "I'm using provider X and here is my account info.". If distributed social networks ever go anywhere (a dubious proposition, I'll admit) then automatic configuration/hosting could be bundled, with all the necessary configuration and DNS records done for the user.
Of course this magical company could go bust, but even if it did, the users would technically be able to migrate to one or more other providers without losing anything, including URLs.
The problem is that the popular free providers don't offer domain hosting, and the paid ones that do (e.g., Google Apps, FastMail) already handle that for you, if you let them.
It's not just a map layer - it's also Gmail, chat and forums GUI (see below in this thread), various Google APIs, Reader, Labs...
They managed to get a lot of things right, which is hard. Now not only do they seem to stop getting it right, they actively remove the good things they had built. That's a very disappointing trend, which I hope can still be reversed.
It's not free but Gaia GPS works well on my devices. I believe they recently released an android client. Besides the various Topo maps they have an osm layer that's available via internet or for offload cache.
I use it for when going to a rural area I'm not familiar with, since Internet and phone signals is still non-existent or very slow in those areas.
Then why haven't you left already? As someone who has done this years ago, I can only recommend it. The longer you stay, the harder it will be. And next time you want to start using a product, first ask yourself: Could they keep me prisoner if they went evil? Or would I be able to just export my data and leave?
As one example, at $work about a month ago I switched us from our $$$ Google maps implementation over to OSM + Mapquest Open. In some cases the geocoding isn't as good, but it's good enough for the important sites (AU based). And it won't cost us 5 figures a year anymore either.
I've been playing around with a wikipedia layer on Google Maps - http://retred.org - code here: https://github.com/twistedvisions/anaximander. It's just a couple weekends play at the moment, but the cool thing about it is the date slider at the top - you can see what was going on in a certain area at a certain time.
It's a bit shit at the moment (and only has 10% of dbpedia's births, deaths, city foundations and battles at the moment - things with both a time and a place) , but have a play and try not to break my AWS micro instance!
V interesting. I've been looking at this too. There were a few deficiencies in the google implementation that bugged me. (1) You have to click on icons to read the info, I think the wikipedia layer should be browsable and ideally include photos. (2) No way to filter to certain articles (e.g. WWII battles) and (3) No date filter - as you've spotted. Tweet me @mbrenig if you want to talk more.
I used the Wikipedia layer extensively during a road trip around Scotland. It was a great way to find nearby places of interest - I daresay the trip wouldn't have been anywhere as interesting without it. More recently I was in France, hoping to do the same thing. To say I was disappointed to find the feature had been removed is a massive understatement.
I don't really understand how Google gets away with this sort of thing, I thought it was Software 101 to never remove features. It's sort-of understandable if the feature has very few users, but it sounds like this one is used by quite a lot of people.
Well, that Software 101 thing applies to software you sell to customers. The theory is that you should keep doing the thing that people pay you money for.
However, with Google, we aren't the customers, we're the product. So here the equivalent question is, "Does the Wikipedia layer help the advertisers make sales?"
It could well. For example, getting rid of the Wikipedia layer might make people more likely to click on displayed ads. So the people who leave Google because of the change might have clicked many fewer ads than will now be clicked by those people now more focused on the important thing. That is, giving Google money.
This is in the site navigation on mobile web and it's accessible on desktop. The official Wikipedia apps also have a nearby feature as well, but I wouldn't recommend you use them to be honest. Our mobile web view is much faster, and allows you edit, upload photos, watch pages, etc.
Yes. But when you used to have a company culture that looked favourably on niche features, and you later start to remove niche feature after niche feature after niche feature, that you start make a lot of people a little disappointed in you.
In other words:
Lets say you remove 100 "niche features".
You have 100,000 users.
Every niche features was used by 0.05% of your users.
Now you have upset 100000 * 0.0005 * 100 = 5000 or 5% of what is likely among your most vocal users.
This assumes the set of upset users for each feature is disjoint. Not sure it makes a difference to your larger point, but I have a feeling that there would be overlap.
Niche features tend to be disjoint, in that they're mainly defined by use case and audience. If a bunch of little things are used by one audience, that is often treated as just one feature, even when they would be considered separate features if they were for different audiences. If something is used across audiences, the feature generally isn't thought of as niche.
Even if they're not disjoint, you've pissed off what, 1-3% perhaps? now consider the fact that each of the pissed of users has multiple reasons to be pissed off, they're going to be a lot more vocal, which is going to be worse for you.
This seems pretty arbitrary. I'm sure there was a business case discussed, but between this, Reader being discontinued, and the new mega-application in Android for OS updates, I sometimes wonder what direction Google is heading in the near future. 2006-2011ish seemed like such a great era of Google-led innovation (my dates are probably off or rose-colored -- your call).
Its quite probable the engineer that built the layer has left (either Google altogether, or just to another team).
As its aged its started misbehaving, and nobody left is interested enough to figure how to fix it. Ultimately its easier just to ditch it than to maintain.
Sounds like a good case to ensure documenting of codebase is expected. Is bitrot a normal thing in firms such that somewhat large projects are abandoned because of poorly documented code?
Recent changes in Google+'s GUI (shortening messages and centering everything) have made its information density unbearably small. I stopped using it after the GUI changes.
I agree. <sarcasm>Artist and photographers love autocenter/ crop, because it always works great.</sarcasm>
As someone who inherited an open studios site that did the auto cropping of artist images thing, the first thing I did was get rid of that. I was a minor hero.
> the new mega-application in Android for OS updates
Without this fragmentation would continue to be a huge issue and make Android development much less palatable than the alternatives (iOS/maybe WP). What would you have Google do instead?
Probably the same actions, but discuss openly the implications? I'm not saying they're doing something that doesn't make sense, or is immoral or something. Just the functional capacity they're giving themselves. Full control over the OS through a closed source binary implies the ability to put in any code they want--nefarious or not. What happens then when the update mechanism is cracked?
It's aimed at fighting fragmentation that HN lament so much about by providing the core Google service in apps rather than the OS, but now people complain that more and more of google code is in binary apps rather than the open source OS.
Luckily OsmAnd+ (cost £5, there's a free version) is brilliant, and having all of the maps loaded into the phone at once is so much better than having to download bits of maps as you go along. It navigated me around Japan faultlessly last January.
I just tried to see if this bug exists in OsmAnd+ but couldn't reproduce it. In general, it is a tight and stable app. Give it a try. There is a free version which is as good as the paid one.
I don't recall OsmAnd{,+} ever freezing. On the other hand I have a beefy phone (Galaxy S3) so it's possible that a phone with a less powerful chip would have trouble rendering.
Edit: Just tried it now and I can zoom out to the whole of Tokyo (and in fact wider) no problem.
> Google really did a great job with the gmail UI. Truly it's awesome.
It was great in the beginning indeed, but recent changes are also very disappointing. Well, they didn't touch the mail much yet, but the changes to built-in Google Chat were just bad.
I have got several thousand chat threads over the last six years, with many threads in excess of a thousand lines long - so I've used it quite a lot.
I really didn't like the changes they made as they went from the old GChat to Hangouts:
- probably the worst is that they stopped breaking down the conversation in separate chat sessions: now you get a neverending scroll, so there's no easy way to tell when the yesterday's discussion ends and today's begins;
- what's even worse, this scroll loads in small pieces. Before I could open a 800-lines long conversation and Ctrl+F the words I needed - not anymore, now I'd have to scroll through it all;
- the conversations are still separate in the history, but if I click on one, I get to its end, and actually look at the beginning of the next one. If I want to re-read the conversation from the very beginning, I have to either scroll up or actually select previous conversation. No biggie, but still annoying;
- less text fits in the new chat window;
- there's no timestamp by default now (they only show up on mouseover only).
Okay, now, what DID they add? Hundreds of cartoonish emoticons and user avatars instead of names.
Guys, I'm not a 7-year old, could you please take away that bright plastic rocking horse and give me back the tool that wasn't so shiny, but worked really well?
I'm sure there are better chat clients; but what was really awesome is that GChats were integrated with GMail, so I could search them both at once. That's a great help if you hold half the conversations in emails and another half in a chat - I won't have that with a separate chat client.
But enough ranting. Any pointers for a website/app/service that'd handle chats and email at once, like GMail used to? Preferably online or with a sync option, because having access to your whole history from anywhere is really great.
- probably the worst is that they stopped breaking down the conversation in separate chat sessions: now you get a neverending scroll, so there's no easy way to tell when the yesterday's discussion ends and today's begins;
- what's even worse, this scroll loads in small pieces. Before I could open a 800-lines long conversation and Ctrl+F the words I needed - not anymore, now I'd have to scroll through it all;
- the conversations are still separate in the history, but if I click on one, I get to its end, and actually look at the beginning of the next one. If I want to re-read the conversation from the very beginning, I have to either scroll up or actually select previous conversation. No biggie, but still annoying;
Could you please tell me what you like about it? I have very mixed feelings leaning towards unpleasantness (where the hell is CC and why does it take more than one click?).
I also cannot stand their forum UI. Things seem to be of almost arbitrary size and color. For example, deleted messages in the listing view are centered, bold and colored. [1] This draws your attention to the deleted message first, which is nearly useless information.
Their hierarchy of boards & topics is confusing, too. There are two different types of hierarchy, but why? They are all clickable and filterable, yet they are almost visual opposites of each other [2].
These are just two, to me, glaring things. The UI is also crazy busy for something I would have though Google would have distilled and simplified.
It's buggy too. I get this nice error message in an alert dialog "ERROR: Possible problem with your *.gwt.xml module file. The compile time user.agent value (gecko1_8) dos not match the runtime user.agent value (unknown). Expect more errors."
I like Gmail because of the threaded view. It's old hat nowadays but the fact remains that the threaded view is quite simply leagues better than old-school email inbox views.
I'm not saying it can't be improved, but it's a very good ux. I even like the new compose, once I got used to it.
As for CC... why do you need it? Just add the address to the "To:" field. The result is the same. The only time you need to put it in a different field is for BCCs, and quite frankly I imagine most don't use that feature.
> As for CC... why do you need it? Just add the address to the "To:" field. The result is the same.
It's true that to a mail server routing the email, yes, the result is the same. That doesn't mean the distinction is pointless, as it carries semantic information useful to the human recipients. The difference between To: and Cc: is the difference between 'I'm talking to you' and 'I'm talking to X, but you can/should listen in (and I want X to know you can listen in)'.
(To be clear, I actually have no problem with the gmail compose window's implementation of cc and bbc - it does only take one click).
When I've looked at gmail, I've found the threading unbearable. The whole concept of email threading is probably a personal preference in the first place, but gmail appears to just group email with the same subject together, which is totally brain dead and renders it unusable for me. Mail.app is just a nicer alternative, for me.
well to me - if I am CC'ed in conversation it means as FYI or "I'd like to hear your opinion", "I hope you don't mind" or similar, i.e. I am on CC just to stay informed, not to actively be on conversation, also sometimes informs the receiver that this is known to someone else.
Other case when 2+ parties with several participants in each are agreeing on something/negotiating it resembles semantic conversation much better you send email with TO set to other parties (you say them this) and CC your colleagues (they hear this and stay in conversation). Btw, and I don't like when people don't include all recieptients when replying, Gmail somehow promotes this
Beg to disagree with your first line. The Gmail GUI was good to begin with but over the past three or four years it has got worse and worse. Now it's poor, and sometimes terrible.
No consolation that some other Google products, such as G+, are even worse.
Ok, I'm not in the best of moods, but: "Truly it's awesome"?
Are you kidding? It fills you with awe? Really?
Critique aside, that's to well worn now, some like it some don't, but what word would you use for child birth, Niagara Falls, the launch of a space rocket, a tsunami, a nuclear explosion, or a cure for cancer?
Don't you think that maybe, just maybe, people use the word "awesome" to describe things that don't literally fill you with awe? Or are you still stuck in that phase of growth where you think you've found enlightenment and feel the need to nitpick everyone around you because you haven't yet grasped that language constructs are mutable?
I mean, I can use it in the literal sense: Your pedantry and sour-puss-ness are awesome. I am in awe of how much of a pedantic sour puss you are.
But then again you might jump on me because sour-puss-ness isn't a word. I'll be sure to go read my Funk & Wagnall's from cover to cover before I post on HN again.
Is there a button or something to automatically expand all the topics in a Google Group without having to click on each collapsed message title? Because I've looked everywhere, and I can't find one.
They have now completely screwed mail composition, though really it has been going down hill for a couple of years. I had to install Thunderbird yesterday to regain sanity.
I giess this will really make devs understand that one day, they might see a world without google or any search engine, and they will start to adapt and create a more decentralized internet.
I'm not talking about a come back to the stone age, but I'm sure there are tons of opportunities to do networking with decentralized apps so that users can actually own their data to make it more relevant. Today the internet is completely ruled by big companies, and users can't really decide how the internet should view them.
The new Maps is an utter failure end to end, IMO. It's much slower than the previous version (both the web and android app), it takes ages to load; the various tools (traffic, etc) are much less practical and easy to use; on the mobile version, it can't cache large areas anymore (complete PITA), and anyway there isn't any way to manage the cache; and the guidance on the android version doesn't work at all anymore, it systematically displays the map on a wrong orientation and gives ridiculous indications; the last couple of times it sent me on the wrong way repeatedly to a point I simply stopped using it at all.
Furthermore I failed to see any significant improvement from the rewrite. Only annoyances.
At one point wikimapia was the most popular map built upon the Google Maps API. I'm pretty sure it's why Google introduced a wiki layer themselves to Google Maps.
Has anyone else started getting huge performance issues with Google Maps recently? The new big update is super laggy for me, so I switched it back to the classic mode. However, that mode keeps freezing up or loads really slowly. The funny thing is it only happens on Chrome.
I just built a new computer. Haswell 4770k, 16 gigs of ram, geforce 760. Google maps desktop performs so bad that I actually use bing maps instead now. I can't believe how slow it is.
I've found that Linux machines which run OS's with older kernel versions (CentOS 6.4) seem to have unbearably bad performance - just speculating but I think it's probably due to a lack of hardware acceleration support in the video card drivers. The new Maps uses vector-based instead of tile-based rendering which requires quite a bit more computational power to achieve a nicer look.
I noticed the WP layer missing (on the public web maps) quite a long time ago. Very disappointing. (I heard there was a disagreement between WP and Google that may have precipitated that.) Along with that, I believe that the amount of information detail on Google's (public web) maps has been dropping steadily. I've assumed that's because of increased mobile usage necessitating bandwidth-trimming measures. (No hard examples, based on expectations created by prior experience.)
Similar things seem to have been happening at OpenStreetMap ... the gradual fade of a certain kinds of detail. Zoom in on a region and see what kind of luck you have identifying bodies of water. (Same problem at Google.) I've had to switch to the MapQuest version for that.
Prior to the last half of August the OSM.org style had not been touched in several years. If you're seeing problems you should file a bug on the style's Github page:
If you're looking for a replacement, I really love the Roadtrippers tool: http://roadtrippers.com
It's not a Wikipedia layer, but their data sets are interesting. There's a lot more context than the Wikipedia layer because they've organized things into categories. Their international coverage isn't as good as their US coverage, though.
I felt the same way when reader was discontinued. "Meh, I never used it and don't see the big deal." Then google got rid of Latitude, which I used extensively, and I finally knew what it felt like. Google will arbitrarily drop something you like and you too will understand the outrage.
WHY? "I think you will not get an answer to that question"
I didn't even know about this layer, but this has tipped the scale for me.
After reader disappearing, trying to change Maps in a way I don't like, pushing G+ everywhere and merging separate products, all the NSA lies, and changing GMail compose, I look forward to supporting non-Google efforts. /rant
If they aren't providing the features that differentiates their services anymore, people will leave them. Just because Google's stuff is free doesn't mean I have to put up with their constant anti-user focus. In fact, that Google products are mostly free makes it that much easier for me to pack up and leave.
Fuck off Google.