If you’ve already heard enough about this, or just don’t care to hear a couple pages’ worth of venting right now, please avert your eyes now. Thank you.

…I’ve had a soft spot for Apple products for a long time, to the point where versions of them have for years appeared in my Young Wizards series as “the preferred devices of the Powers that Be”. (So everything that follows this should be read as “more in sorrow than in anger”, though there’s certainly some anger, make no mistake.) I worked with Apple computers myself in the ancient day (while not owning them) and recommended them wholeheartedly to friends. So it sometimes surprises my readership to find that until recently I’d never myself owned anything Apple-ish but an iPod.

A couple/few months ago this changed when the first serious Apple computing device came into the household, in the form of an iPad. We haven’t had it for very long (I say “we”, but the hard truth is that Peter hasn’t had much of a chance to get his hands on it) but I’ve been enjoying gradually learning its ways, and it makes my work a lot easier. It is peerless for e-reading purposes (especially using BlueFire Reader) and there’s nothing like it for proofreading prose: errors just seem to jump out for the catching.

And one of the great satisfactions of using the iPad, quite early on, was hitting “Maps” and having the house come up instantly, for we’re out in the middle of nowhere. And the pleasure hasn’t just been about finding my own place, but other places, in close detail. For both the working writer and the busy traveler, the Maps icon was a gateway to the most functional of joys. You could find your way in a strange place: you could work out where the nearest post office or cab rank was: you could read a map in the streets of a foreign city without instantly making yourself look like a tourist ready to be relieved of his or her valuables. (Easiest on the iPhone, of course, but there are ways to use the Pad less obviously for this too. Deep purses have their uses, and you could be looking for anything in there.) You could sit in a restaurant over a meal and scout around for interesting places to check out afterwards. Or you could just sit home and do research about the things your characters needed to be doing and seeing in a place you’d never been, moving easily between map view and street view as required.

…But not any more. If you’re alert to computing issues at all, you’ll surely have heard the noise over the last couple of days as regards what’s happened to Maps in the iPhone and iPad. There are explanations all over the place (here, for example) as to why Apple chose to make the change and so forth.

I don’t think this is a minor issue. Accurate and dependable GPS-friendly mapping to handheld and portable devices has become one of the most important reasons to have such a device in the first place. Jeez, if even Sherlock bloody Holmes needs such a thing to save his bacon sometimes, it should be an indicator of how vital such usage is for the rest of us mere mortals.

And what does iOS6 for the iPad and iPhone do with so vital a commodity? It throws out the best online mapping available, that of Google, and goes with a homebrew mapping application.

Baby. Bathwater. Especially since the Apple Maps facility is so not ready for prime time yet.

Once upon a time I knew that if I had both amnesia and the iPad, then Maps on the iPad could get me home. (Best memory of this: using Maps on the iPad in conjunction with the wonderful DB (German Rail) app, (yes, there’s an Android version too, we both have it on our HTC phones) which was given a start point somewhere in the middle of Germany and told “Get me home!” All by itself it got us as far as Dun Laoghaire Ferry Port and then threw its figurative hands in the air and said “All right, not even we can do anything with Irish Rail if they won’t run a rail link to a main ferry port, and they’ve made their bus schedule inaccessible to us, so  you’re on your own now.” But the Google Maps implementation in the Pad did the rest and found the best route back to the right spot on Unnamed Road Number 876,543. And all praise to Deutsche Bahn for whoever they got to build that app for them.) Anyway, once upon a time, the imagery was all clear, right down to a very close zoom, so close you could see not just our driveway but our backyard clothesline.

No chance of any more such happy homecomings, however. I don’t have a comparison shot of the previous view – I never thought I’d need it – but this is what our area looks like now:

The road in front of our house is gone. So are other minor roads in the area (and this is exactly the kind of help a traveler in these parts would seriously need). So is the house, as half the image (as you see) now renders it impossible to find due to poor quality. And what happened over to the left there? And why is the definition sharp again just half a mile away??

Now, yes, granted, this is rural Ireland, not exactly the most populated corner of the planet. But if you check the blog here, you’ll see that great cities have been affected the same way. The Brooklyn side of the Brooklyn Bridge has big problems. Freiburg in Breisgau, a vibrant and beautiful modern/medieval city in southwestern Germany, is now represented in places by postwar aerial imagery (take a look, you can see the bomb craters). Berlin has relocated itself to Antarctica Something really strange has happened to the Schuylkill Expressway in Philly near the Art Museum (which doesn’t look too well either) right next to it. Gothenburg, Sweden, is missing. Closer to home, Dublin Zoo has somehow relocated itself into the south city center, right on top of a hotel where we routinely stay: I’m half concerned that the next time we check in I should bring a whip and a chair in case of lions.  (Also, an area near Dundrum in County Dublin [now mostly famous for a high-end shopping center] has been labeled “Airfield” and the Irish Minister in Charge of Yelling at Apple has had to contact them to get it removed urgently before some iOS6-using pilot [of whom there are many] mistakes it for the military airport at Baldonnell and tries to land there. …Is it gone yet, BTW? I’m afraid to look.)

Apple. How did you let this application leave the house in such a state? What on Earth possessed you?!

Yes, I know about the bad blood between you and Google, about the Apple / Android divide, about your desire to put some distance between you. I understand that perfectly. But here, in this one spot, you should have just sucked it up and said All right, fine, we can cope with this until we have something not just better, but breathtakingly so.

…Too late now.

So many actions in life have unexpected results. Here’s my list of the local ones resulting from this whole business:

(a) I now bitterly regret ever having punched the Upgrade button. I will never regard an Apple OS upgrade the same way again. I should have been more suspicious to start with. Lesson learned.

(b)    The minute there’s a Google Maps app in the App Store? I’ll be all over that like a cheap suit and I will never touch the native Maps icon again. I won’t even look at it. (Probably I won’t be allowed to delete it, which is a shame, because for a long time, every time I see it, I’m going to growl.)

(c)    We will be buying a Samsung tablet at the earliest opportunity. Admittedly, we were already inclined this way for several reasons: (1) for ebook production, because nothing works to test an ebook version like the actual device it’s intended to run on: (b) Peter likes the Android OS better than he does Apple’s (“And now you see why,” says the annoyed voice from the next room):  and (3) the constant and sleazy-looking litigation over whether or not the Samsung looks too much like an iPad has put a bad taste in both our mouths. But this has pushed me right over the edge. Apple, your implementation of Google Maps may not work any more, but I know someone whose implementation will. If my experience is anything to go by, you are driving your customers straight into the arms of your competition. And the ripples from this are going to spread: the longer it goes on and the louder the ruckus gets, the more potential Apple customers are going to say “Nuh uh, don’t want one of those.”

(sigh) Okay, done ranting. But I wish I knew how they were going to fix this, because a function of the iPad that was important and useful to me (and apparently to a whole lot of other people) has been reduced to a heap of smoking rubble. It would be lovely if Apple would amend iOS6 to allow a user to opt in to Google Maps (or out of the Apple mapping application). But bearing in mind the rather controlling nature of Apple, this seems… at best unlikely.

Meanwhile… can anyone recommend a reliable way to roll back to iOS5? (Though I already have a horrible feeling about what the answer’s going to be.)

Thanks.

 

 

 

 

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38 comments

Jennifer September 21, 2012 - 4:31 pm

I believe you can save a link to the web version of Google Maps to your device menu and use that instead. With Apple apps I don’t like or don’t want to see, I just make a folder and hide them…

Jennifer September 21, 2012 - 4:31 pm

I believe you can save a link to the web version of Google Maps to your device menu and use that instead. With Apple apps I don’t like or don’t want to see, I just make a folder and hide them…

Dan Ridley Hallock September 21, 2012 - 4:38 pm

I suspect a Google Maps app will be along soon enough, but in the meantime the Google Maps web site works quite well on iOS devices. I guess I feel that it makes sense for both Apple and customers to let Google handle the Google services (YouTube and Maps) instead of Apple acting as an intermediary by writing the apps for Google services.

Then again, Maps has never been that critical to me; the Google Maps in my area aren’t very good; and the Apple maps in my area are fine — so I’m not very personally invested in the fight 🙂

Dan Ridley Hallock September 21, 2012 - 4:38 pm

I suspect a Google Maps app will be along soon enough, but in the meantime the Google Maps web site works quite well on iOS devices. I guess I feel that it makes sense for both Apple and customers to let Google handle the Google services (YouTube and Maps) instead of Apple acting as an intermediary by writing the apps for Google services.

Then again, Maps has never been that critical to me; the Google Maps in my area aren’t very good; and the Apple maps in my area are fine — so I’m not very personally invested in the fight 🙂

Robin2go September 21, 2012 - 5:23 pm

Honestly, I simply created a shortcut for my iPhone that goes directly to maps.google.com. It’s a workaround, but it’s a far cry better than the Apple maps at this point in time.

Robin2go September 21, 2012 - 5:23 pm

Honestly, I simply created a shortcut for my iPhone that goes directly to maps.google.com. It’s a workaround, but it’s a far cry better than the Apple maps at this point in time.

Mel Walker September 21, 2012 - 5:32 pm

It’s the cell phone providers argument all over again — it’s not like Google maps gets everything right, either. For a long time it was sending cars near me from one dead end to another through a connecting sidewalk. It still doesn’t have all the houses-that-have-been-there-for-years in the next subdivision over. And god help you if you find a mistake and want to correct it.
And in Apple’s favor, my old eyes can actually read the text on the maps while I’m driving, when putting on reading glasses is frowned upon.
I know you must love your iPhone, though — only Apple fans complain about Apple like that. It’s too bad for people like you that Google didn’t bother to have their map app ready when the iPhone 5 launched.

Mel Walker September 21, 2012 - 5:32 pm

It’s the cell phone providers argument all over again — it’s not like Google maps gets everything right, either. For a long time it was sending cars near me from one dead end to another through a connecting sidewalk. It still doesn’t have all the houses-that-have-been-there-for-years in the next subdivision over. And god help you if you find a mistake and want to correct it.
And in Apple’s favor, my old eyes can actually read the text on the maps while I’m driving, when putting on reading glasses is frowned upon.
I know you must love your iPhone, though — only Apple fans complain about Apple like that. It’s too bad for people like you that Google didn’t bother to have their map app ready when the iPhone 5 launched.

John C. Welch September 21, 2012 - 6:40 pm

Whether it makes any sense, the reasons why Apple is so very weird about some things like this date back to three issues that happened about the same time: the PowerPC changeover, Office and Development tools.

Prior to the PPC changeover, while you COULD use Apple’s developer tools, (this is way pre-NeXT), they were really expensive, (yay john sculley) and kind of sucked. So everyone used Symantec’s Think C and Think Pascal. Along comes the PPC, and completely new chip architecture, and of course, requiring a MAJOR change to the dev environments. Symantec is promising a PPC-native version of Think. Any day now. Really. Apple is working on MPW, but that’s taking a long time, and Apple wasn’t exactly organizationally efficient in those days.

So time goes by, Apple has this new chip architecture, and you can’t write programs for it. This is bad. Really bad. Until a little company out of Canada called Metrowerks releases a PPC environment for Apple called Codewarrior, and literally save’s apple’s bacon. Big time.

So all this is going on, and about the same time, you have Word 6. To say that Word 6, and indeed that entire edition of Office was a debacle is being kind. (the story on it is best told here: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/rick_schaut/archive/2004/02/26/80193.aspx Rick’s worked on Word well, forever)

But the thing is, Word/Excel/PPT, or as they were becoming known at the time, “Office”, were one of the very, very few things Apple had going for it in the corporate world. And now, they suck. Badly. Very, Very, Badly. To the point that people are sending Bill Gates videotapes of them setting the Word 6 floppy stack on fire and installing WordPerfect. The story I heard was that Bill sat down in front of a then-current Mac and tried to use Word 6. He then went on a profanity-laced tear through the team that resulted in some immediate work to making it at least *usable*.

Eventually Jobs comes back, and because he knows what’s been going on with Apple, he takes away some lessons from this and one of the biggest is – Control Your Stuff. If something is a critical platform technology, like development environments, or productivity software, and you rely on someone else to do it, at some point, you’re going to be screwed. If you own it, you may screw yourself, but you have some control over that.

It’s kind of hard to see just how thoroughly Apple was bent over given where they are now, but most of the people running the place still personally remember that. So when Apple announced back in June they were doing their own Maps, no one was really surprised, or should have been. Maps are *critical* technology for mobile, Google is Apple’s #1 competitor, and Google is perfectly willing to screw people over when it comes to Maps. (search for: skyhook motorola – to see how utterly ruthless Google is willing to be. tl;dr – no, you will not in fact use non-google mapping implementations if you want to ship an Android device with Google applications, even if that mapping data is better than Google’s. Decent link is here: http://www.theverge.com/2011/05/12/google-android-skyhook-lawsuit-motorola-samsung/ I don’t actually blame Google a LOT here, this is billions of dollars for them. But I wish they’d stop the pretense of the open source hippie commune, it’s annoying and a complete lie.)

I present this not as an *excuse*, but as background information. Apple, in many ways, is still being run as though the late 1990s are not almost twenty years ago. (In a way, they remind me of your description of the Romulans waking up one morning and finding strange starships gliding through their systems. The parallels there are not small, and Steve Jobs even looked vaguely Romulan.)

I agree that Apple’s Maps are not as good as Google’s. (although my experience with Google Maps isn’t that good. Evidently, half the parks in Tallahassee are in the local best buy, and Google regularly told me to go around the town to get to a place about 200m away. But, having lived in Boston for some time, a city that actively hates any attempt to make navigation easy, maps are hard.)

The transit data is interesting to me because as it turns out, that’s totally up to the transit agency. For example, setting Tallahassee aside, because it’s a bit of a podunk town, we can look at Jacksonville Fl. 11th largest city in the US, one of the busiest ports in the country, major military installation. multi-layered transit system. Not a podunk town

Also, not in Google Transit. Why? Because the JAX transit authority doesn’t provide that data. Which I think is stupid, because well, why wouldn’t you. But, it’s not a priority for them, and as a result, no one, not google, not anyone has good transit data for them. Google had a bit of a dustup with VIenna some time back, when the semi-private agencies controlling transit there decided they didn’t want to give all that up to a third party when there were ducats to be made by controlling it.

So to have transit Maps, Apple would have to rely on the same things Google does, and Apple is not good with that, it’s not part of their corporate culture. So, they do what Apple always does when they can’t control the situation: they declare it a third party opportunity and see what happens. (Don’t knock it, this has much to do with how they decided to have native Apps on the iPhone at all – they waited to see if it was actually important to people or not, and when it was, then they moved.)

It’s a bit of a mess, but as I said on Twitter, maps, like politics, is local. And personal. The dustup over transit maps has literally, no meaning for me, since Google didn’t do transit here, or in the next closest big city either. Tallahassee being a state capitol, the overall street data’s always been good regardless of, but Google couldn’t find it’s way around this city with someone ELSE’s map. (although that may just be florida. There was a six-month period when TomTom thought Melissa’s dad was Aquaman. It’s the only reason I can come up with for putting her folk’s house in a lake three miles from where it was. Florida is kind of crazy, so you tend to not notice weird things until someone else points them out. “really? that doesn’t happen to you all the time. Huh.”)

From Apple’s point of view, I can understand their thinking on this. I’m not sure I entirely agree, but I do *understand* it. I can understand Google’s point of view on why they want to maintain a high level of control over their data, including “we put ads in”. (I don’t understand why their applications for enterprise management tools are such pure shit, but when you have a company of engineers with no adults, well, you get “just write to the api” as an answer a lot. I never thought i’d pine for Exchange, but i kind of do.)

It’s all about money and control in the end. Apple, Google, they’re hardly unique. Samsung pulls underhanded stuff, so does Motorola. (HP is currently in a “too stupid to be evil” state, so they just torture you with their web site.) Microsoft licenses everything, so every android device sold makes them between $10 and $30US, but not signing their deals is probably a bad idea. They make money off the iPhone as well, just not sure how. IBM owns the patents for well, *hard drives* so they have an inflow of licensing dollars that the very spirit of greed would boggle at, and IBM has been evil on a scale that Microsoft, Apple, and Google COMBINED couldn’t manage. You’d have to go back to the glory days of Bell to beat IBM evil.

If you ever dig too deeply into tech company practice, you’ll go back to papyrus and charcoal, and be happy to do so.

AzureLunatic September 22, 2012 - 5:38 am

A Florida transit company has an excuse of sorts. I’d be very interested to figure out what earthly sort of excuse SamTrans (the bus system linking San Francisco with Silicon Valley) has for not exposing their data better. Budget, probably?

I now have three navigation-capable devices, all on different platforms: iThing, Android, and the TomTom that I bought the evening after the first day I had occasion to drive a known route in the Bay Area fog. (It turns out that knowing the route in good lighting conditions and with the ability to see more than ~50 feet, but not knowing the area, does not translate well to getting un-lost when the flat lighting removes my sense of direction and the fog obscures most street signs, not even with a map. I got lost three times that day, which I felt was excessive. In retrospect, I could have also bought a compass, but that wasn’t as shiny.) I figure between the three of them and the map, something’s bound to work.

I’m working around the cloudy-with-a-chance-of-meatballs end of tech right now, and two of my immediate co-workers are ex-Microsoft. At least one of them got the chance to amass quite a few war stories in her time there. My personal favorite experience was a case of security-by-obscurity applied *internally*, such that what should have been a routine design decision resulted in a gaping security hole, because none of the people who should have known to test that nothing bad happened when touching on anything related to a many times reported, deliberately left in place as a workaround, and deliberately left undocumented, security hole, did not know to test because it was apparently not internally documented either. I don’t think it was open long enough for anyone to actually use it to gain access to anyone else’s journal, but there’s always that chance. As you so astutely predicted, I no longer trust that company with any of my sensitive data. And that’s just the development side. I don’t think I want to contemplate the practices on the business side.

John C. Welch September 24, 2012 - 3:06 pm

It could very well be budget. It sounds simple: just send a file to *here* and google can use it. But, building that file is not a zero-cost effort and if you want to provide real-time info, the cost goes up. So, in a time of severely limited budgets, and unknown IT state, (state and lower governments typically have terrible IT systems. It’s a budget that gets slashed at will. There’s a reason i’m glad not to work in government IT anymore), i’m not surprised that any agency isn’t going to budget for what can be seen as a duplicate effort.

John C. Welch September 21, 2012 - 6:40 pm

Whether it makes any sense, the reasons why Apple is so very weird about some things like this date back to three issues that happened about the same time: the PowerPC changeover, Office and Development tools.

Prior to the PPC changeover, while you COULD use Apple’s developer tools, (this is way pre-NeXT), they were really expensive, (yay john sculley) and kind of sucked. So everyone used Symantec’s Think C and Think Pascal. Along comes the PPC, and completely new chip architecture, and of course, requiring a MAJOR change to the dev environments. Symantec is promising a PPC-native version of Think. Any day now. Really. Apple is working on MPW, but that’s taking a long time, and Apple wasn’t exactly organizationally efficient in those days.

So time goes by, Apple has this new chip architecture, and you can’t write programs for it. This is bad. Really bad. Until a little company out of Canada called Metrowerks releases a PPC environment for Apple called Codewarrior, and literally save’s apple’s bacon. Big time.

So all this is going on, and about the same time, you have Word 6. To say that Word 6, and indeed that entire edition of Office was a debacle is being kind. (the story on it is best told here: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/rick_schaut/archive/2004/02/26/80193.aspx Rick’s worked on Word well, forever)

But the thing is, Word/Excel/PPT, or as they were becoming known at the time, “Office”, were one of the very, very few things Apple had going for it in the corporate world. And now, they suck. Badly. Very, Very, Badly. To the point that people are sending Bill Gates videotapes of them setting the Word 6 floppy stack on fire and installing WordPerfect. The story I heard was that Bill sat down in front of a then-current Mac and tried to use Word 6. He then went on a profanity-laced tear through the team that resulted in some immediate work to making it at least *usable*.

Eventually Jobs comes back, and because he knows what’s been going on with Apple, he takes away some lessons from this and one of the biggest is – Control Your Stuff. If something is a critical platform technology, like development environments, or productivity software, and you rely on someone else to do it, at some point, you’re going to be screwed. If you own it, you may screw yourself, but you have some control over that.

It’s kind of hard to see just how thoroughly Apple was bent over given where they are now, but most of the people running the place still personally remember that. So when Apple announced back in June they were doing their own Maps, no one was really surprised, or should have been. Maps are *critical* technology for mobile, Google is Apple’s #1 competitor, and Google is perfectly willing to screw people over when it comes to Maps. (search for: skyhook motorola – to see how utterly ruthless Google is willing to be. tl;dr – no, you will not in fact use non-google mapping implementations if you want to ship an Android device with Google applications, even if that mapping data is better than Google’s. Decent link is here: http://www.theverge.com/2011/05/12/google-android-skyhook-lawsuit-motorola-samsung/ I don’t actually blame Google a LOT here, this is billions of dollars for them. But I wish they’d stop the pretense of the open source hippie commune, it’s annoying and a complete lie.)

I present this not as an *excuse*, but as background information. Apple, in many ways, is still being run as though the late 1990s are not almost twenty years ago. (In a way, they remind me of your description of the Romulans waking up one morning and finding strange starships gliding through their systems. The parallels there are not small, and Steve Jobs even looked vaguely Romulan.)

I agree that Apple’s Maps are not as good as Google’s. (although my experience with Google Maps isn’t that good. Evidently, half the parks in Tallahassee are in the local best buy, and Google regularly told me to go around the town to get to a place about 200m away. But, having lived in Boston for some time, a city that actively hates any attempt to make navigation easy, maps are hard.)

The transit data is interesting to me because as it turns out, that’s totally up to the transit agency. For example, setting Tallahassee aside, because it’s a bit of a podunk town, we can look at Jacksonville Fl. 11th largest city in the US, one of the busiest ports in the country, major military installation. multi-layered transit system. Not a podunk town

Also, not in Google Transit. Why? Because the JAX transit authority doesn’t provide that data. Which I think is stupid, because well, why wouldn’t you. But, it’s not a priority for them, and as a result, no one, not google, not anyone has good transit data for them. Google had a bit of a dustup with VIenna some time back, when the semi-private agencies controlling transit there decided they didn’t want to give all that up to a third party when there were ducats to be made by controlling it.

So to have transit Maps, Apple would have to rely on the same things Google does, and Apple is not good with that, it’s not part of their corporate culture. So, they do what Apple always does when they can’t control the situation: they declare it a third party opportunity and see what happens. (Don’t knock it, this has much to do with how they decided to have native Apps on the iPhone at all – they waited to see if it was actually important to people or not, and when it was, then they moved.)

It’s a bit of a mess, but as I said on Twitter, maps, like politics, is local. And personal. The dustup over transit maps has literally, no meaning for me, since Google didn’t do transit here, or in the next closest big city either. Tallahassee being a state capitol, the overall street data’s always been good regardless of, but Google couldn’t find it’s way around this city with someone ELSE’s map. (although that may just be florida. There was a six-month period when TomTom thought Melissa’s dad was Aquaman. It’s the only reason I can come up with for putting her folk’s house in a lake three miles from where it was. Florida is kind of crazy, so you tend to not notice weird things until someone else points them out. “really? that doesn’t happen to you all the time. Huh.”)

From Apple’s point of view, I can understand their thinking on this. I’m not sure I entirely agree, but I do *understand* it. I can understand Google’s point of view on why they want to maintain a high level of control over their data, including “we put ads in”. (I don’t understand why their applications for enterprise management tools are such pure shit, but when you have a company of engineers with no adults, well, you get “just write to the api” as an answer a lot. I never thought i’d pine for Exchange, but i kind of do.)

It’s all about money and control in the end. Apple, Google, they’re hardly unique. Samsung pulls underhanded stuff, so does Motorola. (HP is currently in a “too stupid to be evil” state, so they just torture you with their web site.) Microsoft licenses everything, so every android device sold makes them between $10 and $30US, but not signing their deals is probably a bad idea. They make money off the iPhone as well, just not sure how. IBM owns the patents for well, *hard drives* so they have an inflow of licensing dollars that the very spirit of greed would boggle at, and IBM has been evil on a scale that Microsoft, Apple, and Google COMBINED couldn’t manage. You’d have to go back to the glory days of Bell to beat IBM evil.

If you ever dig too deeply into tech company practice, you’ll go back to papyrus and charcoal, and be happy to do so.

AzureLunatic September 22, 2012 - 5:38 am

A Florida transit company has an excuse of sorts. I’d be very interested to figure out what earthly sort of excuse SamTrans (the bus system linking San Francisco with Silicon Valley) has for not exposing their data better. Budget, probably?

I now have three navigation-capable devices, all on different platforms: iThing, Android, and the TomTom that I bought the evening after the first day I had occasion to drive a known route in the Bay Area fog. (It turns out that knowing the route in good lighting conditions and with the ability to see more than ~50 feet, but not knowing the area, does not translate well to getting un-lost when the flat lighting removes my sense of direction and the fog obscures most street signs, not even with a map. I got lost three times that day, which I felt was excessive. In retrospect, I could have also bought a compass, but that wasn’t as shiny.) I figure between the three of them and the map, something’s bound to work.

I’m working around the cloudy-with-a-chance-of-meatballs end of tech right now, and two of my immediate co-workers are ex-Microsoft. At least one of them got the chance to amass quite a few war stories in her time there. My favorite personal experience was a case of security-by-obscurity applied *internally*, such that what should have been a routine design decision resulted in a gaping security hole, because none of the people who should have known to test that nothing bad happened when touching on anything related to a many times reported, deliberately left in place as a workaround, and deliberately left undocumented, security hole, did not know to test because it was apparently not internally documented either. A developer should have caught that one, not me, and not on the live server. I don’t think it was open long enough for anyone to actually use it to gain access to anyone else’s journal, but there’s always that chance. As you so astutely predicted, I no longer trust that company with any of my sensitive data. And that’s just the development side. I don’t think I want to contemplate the practices on the business side.

John C. Welch September 24, 2012 - 3:06 pm

It could very well be budget. It sounds simple: just send a file to *here* and google can use it. But, building that file is not a zero-cost effort and if you want to provide real-time info, the cost goes up. So, in a time of severely limited budgets, and unknown IT state, (state and lower governments typically have terrible IT systems. It’s a budget that gets slashed at will. There’s a reason i’m glad not to work in government IT anymore), i’m not surprised that any agency isn’t going to budget for what can be seen as a duplicate effort.

AzureLunatic September 21, 2012 - 7:31 pm

The best comment I’ve seen about this so far is this: https://twitter.com/tallin32/status/248868937671004163 “So the iOS 6 Maps application is a totally usable, totally accessible, totally blind-friendly, box of lies?”

This guy is a blind software developer who does a lot of business traveling. He depends on his iPhone, and the map in his iPhone, to be able to travel independently. He is Very Much Not Pleased right now.

John C. Welch September 21, 2012 - 8:46 pm

This is why I tell people “no, unless you’re me, don’t immediately upgrade ANYTHING to ANY major new software version. It won’t always be painful, but when it is, it’s VERY painful.”

there isn’t a platform I’ve worked on where a major software upgrade wasn’t painful. Well, okay, going to V3r1 on OS/400 was easy, but a) that’s a system with uptime measured in DECADES, and b) all applications include the source code, so the first time you run in a new update, it just recompiles and links them.

also, green screen computing. easier in many respects.

But other than that, i’ve never seen a major upgrade that was painless for all. The problem is, you can’t test things. For example, if you’d have asked me about iOS all through the beta, you know what my real problem was?

when you updated Apps and hit “update all”, you had to, up until the GM, type your password for every. single. app.

Maps, I would have told you “The search isn’t as good as google’s, but the turn-by-turn is awesome”.

For me, imagining hundreds of users all having to enter in their password over and over and over and over, or worse, ME doing it was FAR more of a problem than mildly worse map search.

Oh, and did it work with my MDM system. (yes, it did.)

you ask someone else? different answer.

Anyone who’s ever been involved with large scale software will tell you “you will never, ever, ever hit all the use cases. Never.” Really. That friend of mine who worked on Word had someone at a Macworld corner him and complain the vector drawing tools in *Word* were quite sub par.

He said later he didn’t know what to say to someone who had somehow managed to make Word work like some very, very weird version of Illustrator/Photoshop. Because no one on the Mac:Word team would have ever thought ANYONE would do it. But she did. Styles, kerning, blah. Why aren’t Word’s art tools better. That was her thing, and it was very, very important to her.

Maybe no one else, but for her, word was problematic because of…dude, I have no idea, I can’t even guess.

I’m very, very glad I don’t have to develop anything used by that many people. I think I’d be living on a mountainside eating grubs at this point.

AzureLunatic September 21, 2012 - 7:31 pm

The best comment I’ve seen about this so far is this: https://twitter.com/tallin32/status/248868937671004163 “So the iOS 6 Maps application is a totally usable, totally accessible, totally blind-friendly, box of lies?”

This guy is a blind software developer who does a lot of business traveling. He depends on his iPhone, and the map in his iPhone, to be able to travel independently. He is Very Much Not Pleased right now.

John C. Welch September 21, 2012 - 8:46 pm

This is why I tell people “no, unless you’re me, don’t immediately upgrade ANYTHING to ANY major new software version. It won’t always be painful, but when it is, it’s VERY painful.”

there isn’t a platform I’ve worked on where a major software upgrade wasn’t painful. Well, okay, going to V3r1 on OS/400 was easy, but a) that’s a system with uptime measured in DECADES, and b) all applications include the source code, so the first time you run in a new update, it just recompiles and links them.

also, green screen computing. easier in many respects.

But other than that, i’ve never seen a major upgrade that was painless for all. The problem is, you can’t test things. For example, if you’d have asked me about iOS all through the beta, you know what my real problem was?

when you updated Apps and hit “update all”, you had to, up until the GM, type your password for every. single. app.

Maps, I would have told you “The search isn’t as good as google’s, but the turn-by-turn is awesome”.

For me, imagining hundreds of users all having to enter in their password over and over and over and over, or worse, ME doing it was FAR more of a problem than mildly worse map search.

Oh, and did it work with my MDM system. (yes, it did.)

you ask someone else? different answer.

Anyone who’s ever been involved with large scale software will tell you “you will never, ever, ever hit all the use cases. Never.” Really. That friend of mine who worked on Word had someone at a Macworld corner him and complain the vector drawing tools in *Word* were quite sub par.

He said later he didn’t know what to say to someone who had somehow managed to make Word work like some very, very weird version of Illustrator/Photoshop. Because no one on the Mac:Word team would have ever thought ANYONE would do it. But she did. Styles, kerning, blah. Why aren’t Word’s art tools better. That was her thing, and it was very, very important to her.

Maybe no one else, but for her, word was problematic because of…dude, I have no idea, I can’t even guess.

I’m very, very glad I don’t have to develop anything used by that many people. I think I’d be living on a mountainside eating grubs at this point.

BEG September 21, 2012 - 9:07 pm
BEG September 21, 2012 - 9:07 pm
jayblanc September 21, 2012 - 11:11 pm

Apple didn’t choose to stop using Google Maps because of wanting to distance themselves from them… It’s because the agreement with Google to use their mapping data in releases of iOS ran out this year and they *had* to come up with an alternative because Google weren’t going to simple let them renew the deal as was.

jayblanc September 21, 2012 - 11:11 pm

Apple didn’t choose to stop using Google Maps because of wanting to distance themselves from them… It’s because the agreement with Google to use their mapping data in releases of iOS ran out this year and they *had* to come up with an alternative because Google weren’t going to simple let them renew the deal as was.

Hypatia September 22, 2012 - 12:37 am

I upgraded the other night, and was likewise saddened by the changes. In my case, the maps of my area are pretty reasonable–but the features I depend on as someone who doesn’t drive are gone. No more walking directions. No more bus schedules and routes.

On the plus side: maps.google.com works pretty darned well in the browser. So that’s worth a shot. 🙂 It’s not quite as nice to do things that way, but it’s something to tide things over until a Google Maps app is available.

Hypatia September 22, 2012 - 12:37 am

I upgraded the other night, and was likewise saddened by the changes. In my case, the maps of my area are pretty reasonable–but the features I depend on as someone who doesn’t drive are gone. No more walking directions. No more bus schedules and routes.

On the plus side: maps.google.com works pretty darned well in the browser. So that’s worth a shot. 🙂 It’s not quite as nice to do things that way, but it’s something to tide things over until a Google Maps app is available.

David September 22, 2012 - 4:13 am

Tech industry speculation is firmly in the camp of theorizing that Apple can’t have *wanted* to release Maps as-is, so something about the Google license renewal negotiations must have seriously gone wrong. Maybe Google wanted a ridiculous amount of money, or Apple didn’t want to back down on showing its own ads inside of Maps, or something.

I’d imagine that this is going to wind up with, six months down the line, a much-improved Apple Maps (since usage data should let them fix up a lot of problems), and probably a native Google Maps app which is finally up to the standards of the Android version. (If you’ve never used it, the Android version was *so much* better.)

Also, John’s comment is very good.

P J Evans September 23, 2012 - 3:03 am

Ridiculous amount of money, probably.
We’d like to be able to use Google Earth at work, but they want low-hundreds per computer. Per *year*. The big bucks are going into areas that are a lot more important to the company’s future.

David September 22, 2012 - 4:13 am

Tech industry speculation is firmly in the camp of theorizing that Apple can’t have *wanted* to release Maps as-is, so something about the Google license renewal negotiations must have seriously gone wrong. Maybe Google wanted a ridiculous amount of money, or Apple didn’t want to back down on showing its own ads inside of Maps, or something.

I’d imagine that this is going to wind up with, six months down the line, a much-improved Apple Maps (since usage data should let them fix up a lot of problems), and probably a native Google Maps app which is finally up to the standards of the Android version. (If you’ve never used it, the Android version was *so much* better.)

Also, John’s comment is very good.

P J Evans September 23, 2012 - 3:03 am

Ridiculous amount of money, probably.
We’d like to be able to use Google Earth at work, but they want low-hundreds per computer. Per *year*. The big bucks are going into areas that are a lot more important to the company’s future.

XenoPhage September 22, 2012 - 2:32 pm

I see all of the hoopla over this issue and I just don’t get it. Sure, they killed an app, but that app really sucked to begin with. When I first got my iPhone, it took me about 5 minutes to realize that the maps app just wasn’t going to cut it and moved on to using something else. In my case, I use Motion X’s incredible GPS Drive app. For $0.99, you really can’t go wrong there.

Yeah, Apple’s new app kind of sucks, but it’s a version 1 app. And, it’s data “in the cloud” so they can update it whenever they want without requiring users to update their devices. And if I remember correctly, there were similar growing pains for Google back in the day as well. All of these images I’m seeing of mismatched, stretched, and blurred maps seem pretty familiar of what I remember with Google ….

I’m not apologizing for Apple, per se, but it always seem they get pounced on whenever there’s a hiccup. Meanwhile, other companies put out crap and no one says anything..

XenoPhage September 22, 2012 - 2:32 pm

I see all of the hoopla over this issue and I just don’t get it. Sure, they killed an app, but that app really sucked to begin with. When I first got my iPhone, it took me about 5 minutes to realize that the maps app just wasn’t going to cut it and moved on to using something else. In my case, I use Motion X’s incredible GPS Drive app. For $0.99, you really can’t go wrong there.

Yeah, Apple’s new app kind of sucks, but it’s a version 1 app. And, it’s data “in the cloud” so they can update it whenever they want without requiring users to update their devices. And if I remember correctly, there were similar growing pains for Google back in the day as well. All of these images I’m seeing of mismatched, stretched, and blurred maps seem pretty familiar of what I remember with Google ….

I’m not apologizing for Apple, per se, but it always seem they get pounced on whenever there’s a hiccup. Meanwhile, other companies put out crap and no one says anything..

Daniel James September 24, 2012 - 12:29 am

There is a google-earth app in the App Store. iPad compatible. Free too, thank goodness. Still, apple has a lot to learn about letting grudges go in some areas.

Daniel James September 24, 2012 - 12:29 am

There is a google-earth app in the App Store. iPad compatible. Free too, thank goodness. Still, apple has a lot to learn about letting grudges go in some areas.

Beth Rutledge September 24, 2012 - 12:43 am

The only way I know to roll back to IOS5 would be to buy an older iPod with the version 5 not upgraded.

Beth Rutledge September 24, 2012 - 12:43 am

The only way I know to roll back to IOS5 would be to buy an older iPod with the version 5 not upgraded.

John C. Welch September 24, 2012 - 3:02 pm

One data point here, and one I didn’t want to bring up until I had supporting links: According to Google Maps API TOS, you cannot implement turn by turn as a third party dev. Original article here: http://arstechnica.com/apple/2012/06/ask-ars-why-did-apple-have-to-ditch-google-to-add-turn-by-turn-nav/

I just checked and section 10.2.(a).(c).(i) is still there.

Note, this is not unique to Google. In fact, there’s good info that Google hit this same restriction from other map vendors, which may explain why they got into mapping on their own, or be *a* reason: http://www.businessinsider.com/apple-maps-with-turn-by-turn-directions-2012-6

If Google did hold Apple to that restriction, and you don’t have to be overly cynical to see why they would, (CLEAR platform differentiation from their biggest competitor), then Apple had to make their own maps application *anyway*. We can talk about release issues, and I think you’d have to be a bit thick to claim there’s nothing wrong with Apple’s, (not unusual for them, they’ve done this before. FCP, iMovie, etc, they’re very startupish about things like this), but given that clause the reason to drop google seems more logical.

John C. Welch September 24, 2012 - 3:02 pm

One data point here, and one I didn’t want to bring up until I had supporting links: According to Google Maps API TOS, you cannot implement turn by turn as a third party dev. Original article here: http://arstechnica.com/apple/2012/06/ask-ars-why-did-apple-have-to-ditch-google-to-add-turn-by-turn-nav/

I just checked and section 10.2.(a).(c).(i) is still there.

Note, this is not unique to Google. In fact, there’s good info that Google hit this same restriction from other map vendors, which may explain why they got into mapping on their own, or be *a* reason: http://www.businessinsider.com/apple-maps-with-turn-by-turn-directions-2012-6

If Google did hold Apple to that restriction, and you don’t have to be overly cynical to see why they would, (CLEAR platform differentiation from their biggest competitor), then Apple had to make their own maps application *anyway*. We can talk about release issues, and I think you’d have to be a bit thick to claim there’s nothing wrong with Apple’s, (not unusual for them, they’ve done this before. FCP, iMovie, etc, they’re very startupish about things like this), but given that clause the reason to drop google seems more logical.

Joseph October 1, 2012 - 3:16 pm

I’ve been warning my friends that now Jobs is gone, the quality control of Apple will go down.

I’ve been justified.

However, it’s really easy to go to Google’s maps website and just create a web app. It works very well.

It still doesn’t convince me that product regulation will improve in the future.

Joseph October 1, 2012 - 3:16 pm

I’ve been warning my friends that now Jobs is gone, the quality control of Apple will go down.

I’ve been justified.

However, it’s really easy to go to Google’s maps website and just create a web app. It works very well.

It still doesn’t convince me that product regulation will improve in the future.

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