It’s just like Internet Explorer on Windows 20 years ago. Microsoft only needed to make a good product long enough to leverage it into their other monopoly products, then they no longer gave a shit. We can hope Google Maps suffers the same fate.
I can’t help but roll my eyes reading stuff like this. Cows have no choice in their lives, Google Maps users can switch to an (increasingly competitive) alternative with very little switching cost.
Of course it’s in Google’s interest to keep their product usable.
Ok, off topic, but having grown up around cows, they will line up each day waiting for their chance to get on the milking machine. They very much do like them.
You need to drag the "man" icon and drop it on the map.
I had to google that.
I hate that UI. Why can't we just click on the "man", and then click on a spot to drop it?
You can, actually. When you click it, all of the roads that have street view are highlighted with blue color. In this mode you can just click on the roads to go to street view.
That's exactly how it works.
Click the man, roads with street view data are highlighted, click a road.
Buckingham Palace used to have a little Queen, but that is no longer the case.
Lately I'm particularly baffled by the bar at the top, which is a way to search without typing. I click "Transit" and I'm presented with a list filled mostly with bus stops, with no filters for rail etc. Great. Does it also switch me to the transit overlay, which might be helpful? No, of course not.
There's a "Keep North up" option while navigating, and I think if you click the "center map on me" button while not navigating one of the states will keep north up.
IMO smartphone compasses and gps are still too noisy to use anything other than "keep north up" as the default. Trying to navigate while your pin spins and jumps around on a map is dangerous and difficult, having the entire map spin around at the same time is just madness. I wouldn't be surprised if this decision hasn't killed someone.
The other setting I'd love to see is to switch off re-framing. Let's say I select a destination, then I'm curious how long it will take to get there, so I select directions. Then I scroll around a bit to see other things nearby and spot something interesting. I tap on it, and try to get directions there too, except directions is already active, so I either have to go through the rigmarole of "add stop, delete the other one", or press the back button a few times to come out of directions. Except when I do, Maps first zooms out to show my entire route, then zooms back in to the original destination, and now I have to scroll around and try and find that second thing again. I'd rather it just left the zoom alone, and let me choose where I want to be looking. Sure, have a button to frame what you're currently looking at if you want, but stop jerking all over the place.
You can zoom map with just one finger (I use thumb) – do almost a double click but instead of releasing the second click, hold it pressed. Now as you hold it, just move thumb up and down to zoom in and out.
It’s a feature I discovered accidentally a few years ago, and in my experience pretty much no one knows about it, but once shown, everyone finds it extremely useful.
And on Android I just avoid the app. I hate that I couldn't turn off the automatic compass. Every time I finally manage to orient myself when in a new place, the map starts spinning like crazy.
I truly feel old when using Google Maps.