Justin O'Beirne

I think you mean this blog? https://www.justinobeirne.com/ , it's been shared a number of times https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=justinobeirne.com here with this one being the most popular https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15965653 , though that's six years old. Still well worth reading

You make it sound like Apple's efforts stop after announcing at WWDC. They do seem to be following through. The "new maps" were announced in 2018. They finished the continental US in January 2020 and since expanded to Canada, UK, Ireland, Spain, Portugal, and Italy with the most previous update released last month. Justin O'Beirne has followed Google/Apple maps in detail for years https://www.justinobeirne.com/ Forbes is an American business magazine and the author covers cover security and surveillance. So I wouldn't think his advice is meant for everyone.

Shout out to all of Justin O’Beirne' amazing analysis on all things maps. https://www.justinobeirne.com/ -he's even got an updated post related to this press release.

The Google Maps thing isn’t entirely about screen size (though I would hope it wouldn’t be quite so bad on larger screens—but I’m only familiar with how it looks on a small-by-modern-standards Android phone, where it’s about the same as on the iPhone depicted in this article, or even a little less); it’s about the product’s overarching philosophy, which has changed over the past decade (in a direction I strongly dislike). It used to be about, y’know, maps, but maps are now incidental, a means to a different end, ably demonstrated by their icon change a year ago from a map to a location pin. It’s all about the destinations now, and mapping has progressively deteriorated and been deemphasised. At least in the case depicted, you should be able to get it to show just the map by tapping once in the map area. (If you’re interested in more about this, https://www.justinobeirne.com has some excellent long-form content analysing all the major maps products, how they’ve changed over time, &c. https://www.justinobeirne.com/google-maps-new-app-icon and https://www.justinobeirne.com/what-happened-to-google-maps are good brief starting points.)

> I really think Google Maps will die. It's just unlikely that for the rest of history, no one will improve OpenStreetMaps to the point that it is competitive. From reading the analyses at https://www.justinobeirne.com/, plus just generally following the tech industry, I'm convinced Google Maps will never die, at least not in any timeframe relevant to this discussion. Between autonomous vehicles at Waymo and Google's desire to provide intelligent suggestions to their Android and web users, they need to have as comprehensive a data set as algorithmically possible. I suppose it's possible that OSM could become good enough that Google would only need to supply a proprietary layer on top of it for their own needs, but given that they can collect better intelligence about roads and buildings than anyone else through their unwitting spies, I doubt they'd want to give up control over the full stack.

https://www.justinobeirne.com/ Updates and observation about Apple (and sometimes Google) Maps

Another great article from this blog! 2017's article from the same author [1] about Goggle Maps' use of photogrammetry and other building scanning techiques was, in my opinion, one of the most interesting HN submissions ever (its comment section[2] is also worth a read). [1] https://www.justinobeirne.com/google-maps-moat [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15965653

This is good stuff, let me add a few you might be interested in: - https://www.justinobeirne.com/ - https://clar.dev/en/ (This one is kinda over-done, but it's quite performant, and I do like its use of type)

Analysis of cartography in Apple Maps and Google Maps: https://www.justinobeirne.com/.

I do not believe that Apple (a design company), can match the quality of Google (an algorithmic organization company), simply by allocating resources. You can read two excellent essays by Justin O'Beirne on Google[0] vs. Apple's[1] methodologies for creating and organizing mapping data. It seems a straightforward conclusion that mapping is simply a problem that's a better fit for Google as a company than Apple. Also note how slowly Apple's strategy has been rolled out (3% of the U.S.’s area in 2018), waiting for this work to be rolled out simply wasn't tenable. [0]: https://www.justinobeirne.com/google-maps-moat [1]: https://www.justinobeirne.com/new-apple-maps

Wasn't the rollout happening by region all through 2019? Doesn't necessarily mean EVERYONE is getting new data TODAY. Look at the previous coverage on this blog - https://www.justinobeirne.com/

https://wired.com/2014/12/google-maps-ground-truth https://justinobeirne.com

If you enjoy reading about map design, I highly recommend this article: "A YEAR OF GOOGLE & APPLE MAPS - How much do Google & Apple Maps change in a year?" https://www.justinobeirne.com/a-year-of-google-maps-and-apple-maps

Recommend taking a look at this blog post: https://www.justinobeirne.com/google-maps-moat the author has updated a couple times. The changes are subtle and are amazing for your benefit. Not seeing the change is them getting better at easing you into the new functionality, not them stagnating.

For those interested in the differences between the maps providers, Justin OBeirne has a set of absolutely wonderful blog posts on them. I look forward to the next one. https://www.justinobeirne.com/

To get serious for a second, here's an amazing article on how far Google Maps is ahead: https://www.justinobeirne.com/google-maps-moat/ It is very hard to catch up with them.

Another great article from this blog! Last year's article from the same author [1] about Goggle Maps' use of photogrammetry and other building scanning techiques was, in my opinion, one of the most interesting HN submissions ever (its comment section[2] is also worth a read). [1] https://www.justinobeirne.com/google-maps-moat [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15965653

He's written multiple articles about maps, even before that one: https://www.justinobeirne.com. He's very good at spotting details in maps–IIRC he worked on Apple's maps team before, so this isn't particularly surprising.

There's a small Polish startup that helps people find nearest pharmacies with given drugs. They did pretty nice analysis and found out their whole infrastructure costs $1300 a month and they would have to pay additional $5000 for Google Maps alone (right now GM costs them nothing). Looks like GM will be ~10x more expensive to them than Mapbox or MapTiler, here's the original article (in Polish) translated by Google (sic!): https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=pl&tl=en&js=y&pr… Looks like many folks who leeched on GM's free plan will move to alternatives so maybe this dick move will turn around and became actually a good thing, would love to see more competition in the area and right now Google Maps is years ahead of competition: https://www.justinobeirne.com/google-maps-moat

For those interested, this site gives good thorough comparisons between different map services (mostly Google & Apple): https://www.justinobeirne.com/ Latest entry in Dec 2017: How far ahead of Apple Maps is Google Maps? https://www.justinobeirne.com/google-maps-moat

Completely agree and have a tough time understanding how anyone could push back? Yet you are down voted? I do not get why it is acceptable now for Apple to provide an inferior user experience? Why do people defend it? If people really need it broken down here is a great link. https://www.justinobeirne.com/google-maps-moat/ On Siri it seems like people finally agree that Siri is horrible compared to the Google Assistant. Also why acceptable? This is about self driving cars. Apple cars kill people will that also be acceptable? Why?

This is a really weird article. Excuse my analogy, almost like something written while sitting in bathroom: short, with minimal value, hero image taking almost as much space as an article itself. I had hoped to see deeper analysis, more data. As an example of deep, thoughtful analysis I recommend wonderful series of posts about Google Maps of Justin O’Beirne: https://www.justinobeirne.com/google-maps-moat — after reading it you feel like you learned something new today.

> and certainly there is nothing in the iPhone ecosystem where they want you to contribute reviews or human analysis to help them with gathering data ... but as a result, they are, perhaps, unable to deliver the product Google can. Consider [https://www.justinobeirne.com/google-maps-moat; previously discussed in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15965653] ... which is fine; Apple doesn't need to be in the business of providing the best mapping software available on a smartphone. But Google appears to be in that business.

Maps has been improving at an amazing rate, and some people are quite excited about it: https://www.justinobeirne.com/google-maps-moat

I was thinking the same thing of "who cares." I take the train and walk a lot more than I drive. I need street names, and GMaps have made them harder and harder to see for years: https://www.justinobeirne.com/what-happened-to-google-maps/ I gotta pinch zoom all the way in, jiggle the map around a bunch, just to see street names. It's annoying as fuck since it's the most important thing on the map when walking in a city to orientate yourself (because we all know those digital compasses are garbage). I should really just carry a magnetic compass on my key chain again. I really miss the classic maps interface. More streets, more relevant detail and much much faster. Classic maps that used the whole screen without the white area on the left, and the vector rendering tech would have been way better than their crappy web interface now.

There was an excellent article on how the designs of Google Maps has dramatically changed from 2016 to 2017. Screenshots were gathered every month, and the trend across months was pretty telling of a shifting emphasis from roads to places. The same was done for Apple Maps, which, for the most part, hadn't changed. https://www.justinobeirne.com/a-year-of-google-maps-and-apple-maps

Apple is still pretty far behind, in my view. Here’s an excellent in-depth comparison: https://www.justinobeirne.com/cartography-comparison/

Not going to be mild here, Google Maps is the absolute poster child of enshittification. Sorry if you've worked on it, it's even more enshittified than search, and the best example of the company being run by the Ads division. This overview 8 years old but it's only gotten worse [1]. Everything in the UI has been optimized purely for businesses and ads, not for users. I'm blessed enough to now live in one of the few countries where Google Maps is not dominant, where local players are more popular. I've gone and taken current screenshots of both to show the difference. Current Google Maps [2]. Note how you can't even hide those UI elements blocking the map, but more important is the map itself. Current locally popular maps app [3]. It.. actually works well as a map, like Google Maps used to before Ads took over the business. And just a single touch on the map to hide the UI. I'm sure the Supernova Hotel and Hostel Ani & Haakien are bringing Google some great cash money though, splendid user feature! Before I lived here, I of course used Google Maps. And when I go abroad, I have to use it. And every single second spent with it is a stark reminder of how much worse it is than the map apps that are most popular here and are not enshittified. [1] https://www.justinobeirne.com/what-happened-to-google-maps [2] https://www.directupload.eu/file/d/8755/pn47kkvj_png.htm [3] https://www.directupload.eu/file/d/8755/ruwp2jy7_png.htm

>> I have a suspicion that gmaps infers roads from photographs, and some of the roads are not roads at all. > There's something called the TIGER database. [1] Of course, that needs to be populated and updated somehow and Google probably applies various corrections. That's for the US though, it wouldn't cover Canada (though Canada probably has an equivalent). IIRC, Google actually has a fairly large team of cartographers keeping Google Maps up to date. In addition to satellite and aerial photographs, and other maps, Google also has the benefit of Street View cars to give it on-the-ground data plus GPS tracks of customers using Google Maps on their phones. On OpenStreetMap, there's a layer that shows all the GPS tracks that its users have uploaded, all superimposed on each other (though last I checked it hadn't been updated in some time). It's pretty easy to make out real roads from that data. This website has some pretty good essays about Google Maps and other mapping services: https://www.justinobeirne.com/.

> I wish I could learn to build my own tiles, vector or PNG. I don't really understand where the data comes from, how is data gathered and assembled. The tools are rapidly evolving. There's no great single entry point and the best advice I can give is pretty generic: find a small-scale thing you want to do and do research toward accomplishing it. The post you're commenting on is about how PostGIS databases mostly do this work for vector tiles on its own now, so "to build your own tiles", you'd set up a PostGIS database and re-read this post. A year or two ago the advice would be pretty different. A year or two from now and the advice will be _completely_ different. That said, from zero http://geojson.io is a dead straightforward way to do basic operations with GeoJSON data. You can paste in JSON and it renders on the map; you can draw on the map and it generates GeoJSON. (https://tilejson.io does the same for raster tile sets.) Real-world data is massive and overwhelming to work with — just drawing your own fake maps in geojson.io and working with that might make some of its concepts easier to digest. Maperitve[1] is a free and relatively straightforward app focused on taking geo data as input and outputting maps. Work with its rendering rules and you'll understand some of the challenges with rendering at different zoom levels or in different contexts. Then this post from 2018[2] on Tippecanoe (tile and data converter), TileServer GL (tile server), and Leaflet…