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bkkz
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This is what happens when Jobs is not around.
New Maps App Is a Rare Apple Flub
NEW YORK (AP) — With a touch of geek whimsy, Google Maps warns anyone who seeks walking directions to Mordor -the land of evil in “The Lord of the Rings”- to use caution. “One does not simply walk into Mordor,” it says. Apple is finding this week that creating an alternative to Google Maps isn’t a simple walk, either.
Apple released an update to its iPhone and iPad operating system on Wednesday that replaces Google Maps with Apple’s own application. Early upgraders are reporting that the new maps are less detailed, look weird and misplace landmarks. It’s shaping up to be a rare setback for Apple.
(MORE: Five Alternatives to Apple’s iOS 6 Maps)
“It’s a complete failure,” said Jeffrey Jorgensen. “It’s slower, its directions are poorer and its location data doesn’t seem to be accurate. All around, it’s not quite there yet.”
Jorgensen, a user interface designer for a San Francisco-based startup, began using Apple Maps months ago, because Apple made it available early to people in its software development program. He said he finds himself relying on Google Maps running on his wife’s Android phone instead.
The most-hyped feature of the new app is a “Flyby” mode that shows three-dimensional renderings of buildings and other features. It presents a convincing depiction of the canyons of Manhattan, but has a hard time rendering bridges and highway overpasses, which tend to look wobbly or partly collapsed.
The Apple app also has a tendency to judge landscape features by their names. For instance, it marks the hulking Madison Square Garden arena in New York as green park space because of the word “Garden” in its name. The TD Garden football stadium in Boston gets the same treatment.
Conversely, Apple Maps marks “Airfield Gardens,” a farm and plant nursery in Dublin, Ireland, as an airfield. This prompted the country’s Justice Minister, Alan Shatter, to warn pilots on Thursday not to land there.
“Clearly the designation is not only wrong but is dangerously misleading in that it could result in a pilot, unfamiliar with the area, in an emergency situation and without other available information, attempting a landing,” he said.
Marcus Thielking, the co-founder of mapping-app developer Skobbler, said the lapses of the Apple app are surprising, particularly since Apple purchases map data from an established provider, Tele Atlas.
“The combination of Apple and TomTom screwing up something like this is very odd. Apple is not the first and only company using Tele Atlas maps,” Thielking said.
(MORE: New iOS 6 Maps: The Data Seems to Be Messy)
Tele Atlas is a subsidiary of TomTom, a Dutch maker of navigation devices.
“We launched this new map service knowing it is a major initiative and we are just getting started,” said Apple spokeswoman Trudy Muller. The app will work better the more people use it, she said, alluding to fact that users can report errors and omissions from within the app.
Google has been in the mapping game for much longer, giving it the benefit of years of error reports to help shape its maps.
There’s been a Google Maps app on the iPhone since it was launched in 2007, but it’s always come with the operating system. Now that it’s gone from the list of “core” apps, users are finding that it’s not available for download either. Google says its goal is to make Maps available, but hasn’t said when that will be.
In the meantime, iPhone and iPad owners can access maps.google.com through their browser, said Google spokesman Nate Tyler. The browser version has fewer features but uses a comprehensive mapping database, he said.
Last year, Apple released another software product that many regard as half-baked: the voice-controlled virtual assistant Siri. But Siri’s ability to -at least sometimes- understand spoken queries was something most users hadn’t met before, so they forgave its lapses. With Maps, Apple is replacing an app nearly every smartphone user is already familiar with.
User reaction on social media has been fierce. One Twitter user quipped that the lines of people queuing up to buy the iPhone 5 on Friday will be shorter, because the buyers will be misled by the new Maps.
Read more: http://techland.time.com/2012/09/21/new-maps-app-is-a-rare-apple-flub/#ixzz27EtWfneT
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Thai Girls : Meet Sexy Thai Girls
Posted on: 5:11 pm on Sep. 22, 2012
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DaffyDuck
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Despite all of Apple's valiant PR efforts, the maps app has problems, mostly due to rushing towards the iOS 6 release date - a fixed date that was immovable - and Apple expending too few resources in order to fine-tune and troubleshoot it properly.
It's not clear if this is a case of "this wouldn't have happened under Steve", albeit quite possibly resources would have been allocated differently for a feature that was being touted as a main feature, back with Steve. Really, well never know.
I disagree with Mr. Big Mouth in that article, claiming that all of maps is a miserable failure. The underlying infrastructure provides a far better environment not for growth, and for quickly correcting such issues. It took Google 5 years to provide a reporting mechanism to report errors, which works haphazardly. Apple does jump no error reports, so use the feature to report errors.
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Bangkok Women : Meet Sensual Bangkok Women
Posted on: 7:43 pm on Sep. 22, 2012
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bkkz
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Quote: from DaffyDuck on 7:43 am on Sep. 23, 2012
Apple does jump no error reports, so use the feature to report errors
I've done quite a fair bit this morning. Lets see how fast they act on it and I'll send them some more.
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Thai Girls : Meet Sexy Thai Girls
Posted on: 4:32 am on Sep. 23, 2012
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bkkz
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Question, how does one add new locations on the map? There are lots of new places that are not shown on the map. e.g. Terminal 21. And lots of new hotels on Sukhumvit Soi 11.
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Bangkok Girls : Meet Sexy Bangkok Girls
Posted on: 6:13 am on Sep. 23, 2012
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DaffyDuck
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It is, indeed, a good question, and one I have sent in to hopefully get an answer before I leave.
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Thai Women : Meet Matured Thai Women
Posted on: 6:52 am on Sep. 23, 2012
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bkkz
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The openstreetmap is not as detailed but at least it's more accurate.
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Bangkok Girls : Meet Attractive Thai Girls
Posted on: 4:46 am on Sep. 24, 2012
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bkkz
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Source: Apple Aggressively Recruiting Ex-Google Maps Staff To Build Out iOS Maps
Apple is going after people with experience working on Google Maps to develop its own product, according to a source with connections on both teams. Using recruiters, Apple is pursuing a strategy of luring away Google Maps employees who helped develop the search giant’s product on contract, and many of those individuals seem eager to accept due in part to the opportunity Apple represents to build new product, instead of just doing “tedious updates” on a largely complete platform.
My source — a contractor who worked on Google Maps as part of a massive undertaking to integrate Street View and newly licensed third-party data to improve European coverage, as well as develop the platform’s turn-by-turn navigation — says that when attention turned to indoor mapping, things started to become less interesting and a lot of staff began looking around for other opportunities. That turned out to be good timing for Cupertino. Here’s what my source describes happening around that time:
Many of my coworkers at Google Maps eventually left when their contracts ended or on their own accord. One guy looked around for other GIS work and ended up at Apple when a recruiter contacted him. He had heard rumors for a while that Apple was going to develop its own in-house mapping platform, and given his experience at Google, he was an easy hire. Apple went out of their way to bring him down to Cupertino and he’s now paid hansomly as a GIS Analyst. Another coworker that was a project lead at Google Maps, left for the East Coast after his contract ended, and was recently contacted by an Apple recruiter. The position sounds like a product development manager position, and will pay him $85k+ and all the moving expenses from the East Coast. He’s gone through 2 rounds of interview and seems like a frontrunner to land that position.
The interest in ex-Googlers is well-placed, he says, and it does seem like Apple is actively looking for more talent to add to its team, according to recent job listings the company has posted. And while there’s a tough road ahead for Apple playing catch-up in this area, my source believes that the possibility of building a platform that truly competes with Google Maps is well within reach for Apple.
Apple has a lot of catching up to do if it wants to build a robust mapping platform to counter Google Maps, so it doesn’t surprise me that it’s going out of its way to lure former and current Google Maps employees. At Google Maps, we know what data’s important, rendering priorities, keyword searches, and how the user experience is suppose to be. However, Apple needs to find a way to get its own 5 million miles of street view data, partner with the right folks, and spend a fortune on licensed data – which it can.
http://techcrunch.com/2012/09/23/source-apple-aggressively-recruiting-ex-google-maps-staff-to-build-out-ios-maps/
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Thai Girls : Meet Active Thai Girls
Posted on: 7:24 pm on Sep. 24, 2012
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DaffyDuck
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So far, RIM is seriously losing all their former strongholds, and the iPhone is cleaning up where RIM fails:
NTSB latest US agency to drop BlackBerry for iPhone
By Daniel Eran Dilger
The U.S. National Transportation Safety Board has announced plans to move 400 users to Apple's iPhone 5 after noting that its existing RIM BlackBerrys "have been failing both at inopportune times and at an unacceptable rate."
According to a report by USA Today, the NTSB stated in a filing that it "requires effective, reliable and stable communication capabilities to carry out its primary investigative mission and to ensure employee safety in remote locations."
The agency investigates plane crashes. RIM's BlackBerry was once highly regarded, particularly among corporate enterprise and government agencies. However, a series of government agencies have announced switches to Apple's iOS platform, mirroring the interest among corporations for building custom apps for iPhones and iPads.
The U.S. government's rapid shift away from its years of dependance upon Canadian RIM messaging infrastructure is based on a number of factors, but includes RIM's failure to match Apple in usability, in third party apps, in development tools, in modern mobile operating system technology, and in deploying functional tablets.
President Obama shown with an iPad 2. Photo via The White House.
While President Obama was frequently seen using a BlackBerry when he entered office four years ago, he is now carrying an iPad. Apple's iPads and iPhones have also been approved for use in Congress.
Shift toward iOS at the expense of RIM
In February, the US General Services Administration, tasked with managing procurement for all federal agencies, announced plans to support iOS devices by adding Apple's products to the agency's list of approved devices for government procurement.
That occurred just weeks after the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration stated it would be moving from RIM to iPhones and iPads.
NOAA's chief information officer Joe Klimavicz stated at the time that Apple's devices were more cost effective to integrate into the agency's current infrastructure than RIM's, which are tied to the company's BlackBerry Enterprise Server. RIM had earlier announced plans to support iOS devices in its BES product, but that move wasn't enough to stop the shift from occurring.
Since then, a series of other federal agencies have announced plans to drop BlackBerry for iPhones. In May, the Transportation Security Administration announced plans to spend $3 million on Apple products rather than continuing to buy the RIM BlackBerry and Microsoft Windows products it has historically used.
In September, Immigration and Customs Enforcement said it was dropping over 17,600 BlackBerry devices for iPhones because RIM "no longer meet the mobile technology needs of the agency," and in October, the Defense Department's Defense Information Systems Agency program cut RIM from its planned mobile device purchases that includes the iPhone, a move involving 162,500 devices with the potential to grow to 8 million mobile devices.
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Thai Women : Meet Matured Thai Women
Posted on: 5:56 pm on Nov. 21, 2012
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Jademan
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Does anyone know If I bring my US Verizon iPhone 5 to Thailand, (a) will it work at all, and (b) is there a way to get the app that will locate my phone if it goes missing? Thanks for the help in advance.
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Bangkok Girls : Meet Attractive Thai Girls
Posted on: 2:17 pm on Jan. 2, 2013
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