We own this; we manage the vendors. This is no...

27th September 2012

Quote reblogged from ShortFormBlog with 17 notes

We own this; we manage the vendors. This is no one’s issue but ours.

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An Apple executive • Speaking to David Pogue about the technical failings of its maps app, which have been well-documented elsewhere. Pogue has a way with words in his review of the program: “So Apple has written a beautiful, well-designed app — and fed it questionable data,” he says. “It’s as though you just got a $1,500 professional coffee maker and then poured moldy beans into it.” Ouch. (via shortformblog)

It’s odd how short everyone’s memories are. All of us have had similar problems trying to work with our GPS apps - if i misspell a road name, it reports the location in the middle of the city, or if it doesn’t understand the house number, it points me to the middle of the road, and in some cases, in addition to the real address, I have to put a fake address in my Contacts for Navigon to get it to navigate me to the right place.

And in the example given about the road near Hoover Dam, on Google Maps/Earth, you can still see the road that dives into the canyon that Google was reporting not that long ago and the “doesn’t line up very well” bridge that they pasted over the map to correct the problem. And no, Google hasn’t corrected this everywhere - if you look in your own cities, you can find plenty of bridges that dive onto the roads/rivers below it - they’ve only corrected the high-profile ones (like the ones in blog posts).

And Navigon (until very recently) didn’t understand addresses like “100 Main St Suite 25” and would take me to the middle of the city instead - I had to change all of my addresses to the alternate, but little used, format “100-25 Main St” (since Navigon was the best there was at the time, and I could work around this problem). At least Apple Maps understands Suite numbers (unfortunately, they don’t understand “100-25 Main St”, so I’ll have to remove all of the Navigon-isms in my Contacts and go back to “normal” addresses.

Yes, Apple Maps has some work to do, but it’s no worse than any other GPS app (Google included) that I’ve tried to use. Anybody who depends on a GPS app, even one from Apple or Google, to get every address or set of directions correct, gets exactly what they deserve. And even with Apple or Google, I will sometimes have to put in fake addresses that put me where I really want to be - it’s just the nature of the beast for mapping apps.

hmm ...