• Hey, guest user. Hope you're enjoying NeoGAF! Have you considered registering for an account? Come join us and add your take to the daily discourse.

iOS 6 |OT| New Maps? googy pls

hirokazu

Member
Here is a comparison of a map area in iOS 6 maps that will look different depending on whether you are looking at it from China or elsewhere:

Outside China, Inside China
cMJZ4l.jpg
byL2ql.jpg


Other things to note:
1) Its not using Apple cartography, or at least it is different from the cartography Apple uses elsewhere. I'm betting its AutoNavi's cartography, since many Chinese map services mimic the Google Map style.
2) Its not using vector data, it looks like its using tiles, like the "old" maps. But it seems to load faster than the old ones.
3) Both Google and Apple are using AutoNavi in China (both screenshots below show attribution to AutoNavi). Apple shows more data at higher zoom levels than Google, it may even have more data for some reason. This is also a random small town, in case you want to know how detailed data is:
HW4Dkl.jpg
USmrKl.jpg

4) It follows PRC geography. Note the 9-dashed line that represents China owning most of the South China Sea, and another dash to include Taiwan:
uVHP1l.jpg
Thanks, that makes sense now. I guess Apple's got nothing to worry about with Maps in China then. I wish they'd just integrate it with the regular vector maps that everyone else sees. It's just weird that there's currently two different mapping system in use depending on whether you're in China or not. Google managed to integrate AutoNavi into their maps, so I can't see why Apple couldn't do the same. Maybe they're working on it and this is just an interim solution.
 

jts

...hate me...
^ that's uggs. Also, that's the spot for the Do Not Disturb icon, so that's probably the main reason why the lock was removed. The other reason is because it was largely useless. TBH I didn't even notice it was gone until I read it here right now.
 

frico

Member
Is any one finding that their phone slows down quite a bit with a lot of app crashing after a few days? I find I am force resetting my 4S a lot.
 

Cr0wn0

Member
Is any one finding that their phone slows down quite a bit with a lot of app crashing after a few days? I find I am force resetting my 4S a lot.

Yup, I have to reset every 2 or 3 days or the phone just slows to a crawl. This morning nothing would even open. Reboot seems to fix it. On a iPhone 4.
 

hirokazu

Member
Ugh, the Wi-Fi problem is happening to the iPad 3 so much now. If I don't restart it after it happens, I'll eventually just get a black screen when turning on the screen and I'll have to force reset.

I hope beta 3 is released relatively soon and fixes this.
 

noah111

Still Alive
Really tempted to jailbreak iOS 6 just to get toggles and brightness accessibility. But even then it's poorly implemented. How long until Apple finally gets around to doing these things? There's a whole useless page on the switcher for the volume bar, if you take that away you could fit 4 toggles on that screen and squeeze the volume slider, and even a brightness slider, on the playback controls page.


^Made that trying to find a solution to how to keep the switcher to only two pages (previously playback and vol. bar) without ditching the volume access and adding a brightness access as well. I think something like that would work nicely and make sense, since volume is for music and brightness is for video (which both can be controlled via the playback controls). If I had the coding skills i'd try and make a JB tweak out of it.

October is still a long ways away.. what're the chances of them actually sneaking useful new features before release, anyway?
 
October is still a long ways away.. what're the chances of them actually sneaking useful new features before release, anyway?
I'd say iOS 6 has been feature complete since WWDC. These betas are mostly designed so that devs can get their stuff running on the new APIs and whatnot.
 

hirokazu

Member
There will be slight tweaks and minor new features here and there before the final release, but those quick toggles won't be coming any time soon.
 

Fowler

Member
Here is a comparison of a map area in iOS 6 maps that will look different depending on whether you are looking at it from China or elsewhere:

Outside China, Inside China
cMJZ4l.jpg
byL2ql.jpg


Other things to note:
1) Its not using Apple cartography, or at least it is different from the cartography Apple uses elsewhere. I'm betting its AutoNavi's cartography, since many Chinese map services mimic the Google Map style.
2) Its not using vector data, it looks like its using tiles, like the "old" maps. But it seems to load faster than the old ones.
3) Both Google and Apple are using AutoNavi in China (both screenshots below show attribution to AutoNavi). Apple shows more data at higher zoom levels than Google, it may even have more data for some reason. This is also a random small town, in case you want to know how detailed data is:
HW4Dkl.jpg
USmrKl.jpg

4) It follows PRC geography. Note the 9-dashed line that represents China owning most of the South China Sea, and another dash to include Taiwan:
uVHP1l.jpg

It looks like you have to be in Mainland China for it to work. I'm in Hong Kong and my HK maps aren't as good as the screenshot you posted earlier.
 

Stumpokapow

listen to the mad man
*goes to look for local bus routes* oh right.

*checks to see if any apps are registered as routing apps in app store* nope

*actually searches for apps* found 6

Hope they get routing app registration up and running
 

Blackhead

Redarse
*goes to look for local bus routes* oh right.

*checks to see if any apps are registered as routing apps in app store* nope

*actually searches for apps* found 6

Hope they get routing app registration up and running

Could you share which city you're located in and/or how you found those 6 apps? Maybe it's a canada thing?
 

LCfiner

Member
I imagine the routing apps will be registered by whenever iOS6 actually launches. I figure we're still 3 months away from release.
 

Majine

Banned
I like that they integrated Facebook with contacts, but there are some issues. Instead of just filling in my existing contacts, they just add another contact. And if they don't put up their phone number on Facebook (and many of my friends don't), I'm gonna have to have double contacts for each person because the FB imported ones aren't editable.
 

btkadams

Member
*goes to look for local bus routes* oh right.

*checks to see if any apps are registered as routing apps in app store* nope

*actually searches for apps* found 6

Hope they get routing app registration up and running

so, is maps still completely empty for us canadians? when i had ios6 on my ipad earlier last month, there was barely anything on the map for calgary.
 

Cheebo

Banned
The mess of the podcast app is confusing. How easy it was to subscribe and find podcasts on iTunes is pretty much entirely responsible for the podcast market. How they did something so perfectly on desktops but so messy on iOS is odd. Why release it now? Should have been part of iOS 6 to give them more time to fix it up.
 

Utako

Banned
I do believe I shall be holding off on iOS 6 until GMaps gets a third-party release.

Then joining the class-action against Apple for not being able to set default apps.
 

Blackhead

Redarse
Inside Apple's Go-Slow Approach to Mobile Payments
WSJ said:
Apple Inc. often bides its time before diving in to developing tech markets, which explains why it's largely on the sidelines in the mobile-payment wars.

Mobile payment is a new battlefield in the wireless industry, with companies fighting to offer consumers a way to pay for purchases with their smartphones instead of wallets. Mobile-payment transactions are expected to exceed $600 billion world-wide by 2016, according to market-research firm Gartner Inc., up from $172 billion this year.


Google Inc. last year unveiled its Google Wallet service that lets some users hold Android phones in front of small terminals near cash registers to pay tabs. A group of wireless carriers is pursuing a similar service, called Isis.

Microsoft Corp. last month said it will release a new digital-wallet service that stores credit-card information and other mobile-payment information.

But Apple's entry is noticeably less ambitious.

Last month, it unveiled a service called Passbook that pulls together loyalty cards, tickets and coupons. But Passbook, which Apple will release this fall, drew attention for what it doesn't do: It can't link directly to credit or debit cards, so consumers can't use it to replace their wallets.

Holding back in mobile payments was a deliberate strategy, the result of deep discussion last year. Some Apple engineers argued for a more-aggressive approach that would integrate payments more directly.

But Apple executives chose the go-slow approach for now. An Apple spokeswoman declined to comment on the decision-making process.

Apple's head of world-wide marketing, Phil Schiller, in an interview last month, said that digital-wallet mobile-payment services are "all fighting over their piece of the pie, and we aren't doing that."

Apple often bides its time before diving in to developing tech markets, which explains why it's largely on the sidelines in the mobile-payment wars.

An inside look at Apple's decision-making on mobile payments gives a window into the wait-and-see approach Apple often takes towards new markets. While Apple has revolutionized a number of industries—from music to mobile phones—it isn't often the first mover, choosing instead to wait for others to work out the kinks in a market.

"Apple is always a comfortable number two," says Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster, citing its relatively late entries in the MP3 player, smartphone and tablet markets as examples. "They let their competitors do their market research for them."

The approach leaves competitors and partners, from media companies to retailers, scratching their heads trying to anticipate the moves of the world's most valuable company.

As competition in the smartphone market, in particular, heats up, it could leave Apple vulnerable. Still, the market is nascent enough that Apple can afford to take its time, says Nick Holland, a senior analyst at the Yankee Group. "Right now it is just a gold rush," he says, saying the business models and leaders will be more solid in 18 months.

He and other industry watchers, from analysts to rivals to security professionals, expect Apple to come out swinging eventually once consumers become more comfortable substituting their phones for their wallets.

Apple would appear to have an advantage in the mobile-payment arena. The company has sold more than 200 million iPhones and has some 400 million credit-card accounts registered with its iTunes store.

Last year, Apple engineers and executives considered some aggressive approaches to exploit that advantage when in-house debate over the market began in earnest. Google unveiled its Android payment system around the same time.

A small group began investigating whether the company should create a new service that would embed various payment methods into the iPhone or build a payment network of its own, according to people familiar with the matter.

Apple's head of iPhone software, Scott Forstall, was interested in the idea, say people familiar with the matter, and engineers on his team began to brainstorm a comprehensive "wallet app."

They discussed whether Apple should facilitate payments to merchants directly, one of these people said. The idea didn't go very far, on account of the complexity, including the possibility that the company would need to become a bank.

The Apple team investigated ways to make money from various ideas, such as teaming up with an existing payment middleman and taking a small cut of many transactions rather than layering on an additional fee. Some who worked on the project referred to the idea as "the Superman III" play, in honor of the movie's greedy tech-savvy villain, this person said.

The team started to scale back its ambitions. Apple engineers discussed the possibility of a mobile software app that would give users access to payment cards, along with coupons, in one place and recommend which one should be used for each sale, according to one of these people.

For instance, when a user went to buy clothes at department store Macy's, the software would recommend whether they should use their standard credit card or a Macy's card, if they had one, based on available offers through each.

With Groupon Inc. and Google's daily offers product in their sights, they also considered whether to integrate daily deals as well, this person said.

Meanwhile, Apple's iPhone-hardware division had already been studying technologies for over-the-air payments, including a version of Bluetooth connections that require less energy and near-field communication, known as NFC, according to several people familiar with the investigations.

NFC technology lets users tap their phones at terminals near a cash register to pay. Google Wallet uses this technology, and Microsoft's service plans to as well.

Apple employees patented some NFC ideas but worried about whether the technology was secure enough, and whether they could squeeze in the required chip and a new antenna without severely impacting the iPhone's battery life. Executives were also leery of the slow adoption of NFC among retailers, whom industry analysts predict won't adopt it in any meaningful way for three or four more years.

When the payments plan came to an executive review in early 2012, several Apple senior executives balked, says a person briefed on the meeting.

Apple's chief financial officer, Peter Oppenheimer, questioned whether there was newer secure technology that employed the Internet rather than use NFC, this person said.

Apple's Mr. Schiller was worried that if Apple facilitated credit-card payments directly consumers might blame Apple for a bad experience with a merchant.

The executives ultimately opted for the more scaled-down version of Passbook, which engineers still referred to as the "wallet app."

After Mr. Forstall showed off the service at Apple's developer conference last month, analysts immediately predicted Apple would add more payment functionality eventually. "What they essentially have is everything you would store in a physical wallet apart from the cards," says Mr. Holland of the Yankee Group. "I imagine Apple will layer physical world payments as a future capability."

I'm surprised to hear that Apple considers NFC to not be secure nor ready for primetime. I guess this means the next iPhone won't have any surprises?
 

kehs

Banned
Battery life is a really weak argument for not using NFC. Like super duper weak. NFC is an ultra low power passive style tech. Impact on battery life in negligible unless you're broadcast /writing nonstop. Even then I can't imagine it being an issue.

Their small cut is probably what drove the decision more.

Security is not a problem either, if it was they wouldn't be using less secure implementation in credit cards currently. So unsecure that they scramble to cover up mythbusters from busting it.
 

jts

...hate me...
TBH, I'm feeling the same way... after having my iPhone jailbroken, I don't think I can go back to not having these tweaks and waiting months again for another jailbreak.
Not that far from that idea either, and I'm a god damn die hard.

After like a month of iOS 6, and not counting the bugs of course, the experience doesn't really add anything new to the iPhone. I can post faster on Facebook and use Do Not Disturb at night? I think that's pretty much it.
And the maps suck, damn it.

Will wait for the new iPhone and the full iOS 6 though. But still.
 
Here is a map feature that i want, bookmarking locations and then showing each on on the map at once. Then be able to sort through those pins by distance to you and create a waypoint in which it figured out the best route to all the points you want to go.
 

hirokazu

Member
Inside Apple's Go-Slow Approach to Mobile Payments

WSJ said:
Last month, it unveiled a service called Passbook that pulls together loyalty cards, tickets and coupons. But Passbook, which Apple will release this fall, drew attention for what it doesn't do: It can't link directly to credit or debit cards, so consumers can't use it to replace their wallets.
I'm surprised to hear that Apple considers NFC to not be secure nor ready for primetime. I guess this means the next iPhone won't have any surprises?

Well that's a pretty dumb thing to say by the Wall Street Journal. They can't announce NFC mobile payments that link to credit or debit cards because they don't have any announced hardware that supports the feature.

That's like if they announced Siri at WWDC last year and said "Oh, by the way, this doesn't work on any iOS device in existence, LOL."

These recent reports of Apple apparently still playing the waiting game on NFC is kinda dashing my hopes or it on the next iPhone. I just hope they don't actually know the whole story (or have deliberately been thrown off), and Apple's is prepping up their Passbook-based solution.
 
Apple not totally embracing NFC makes sense, in a way. There's like 3 or 4 different standards all at each other's throat right now trying to establish dominance. Apple's choice was "try to pick a winner" or "roll your own".

Myself, I'm still not totally comfortable with my phone taking on the role of my wallet. It makes it all that more valuable to pickpockets, and gives you a single point of failure.
 

hirokazu

Member
One very big problem with Apple's location servers in Australia is that it identifies locations based on the LGA rather than the actual suburb name.

This has always been an issue with Find My Friends and now that they're taking over Maps, it's become an even bigger issue. Often the name of the LGA is the same as nearby suburb so in effect, the address shown is completely off.

Just to show how bad it is, I've circled all the places labeled in Sydney that are more than slightly wrong. About half of the places I haven't circled are also wrong, but close enough to where they should be:
IMG_0071.jpg


If you search for "Merrylands":
IMG_0073.jpg


It'll tell you the address is Holroyd, New South Wales. Yes, the LGA is Holroyd, but LGAs aren't used in addresses, ever. The area in red is the suburb of Holroyd, the area in blue is Merrylands.

This also means a lot of labels are in the wrong locations because they've been processed by the LGA rather than the suburb. I tried to find a street in a particular suburb on Friday. It didn't recognise it at all and put the pin down at what it thought was the next closest match - nowhere near the place I was looking for.

Another issue is that the names are shown on the maps are exclusively LGA names. No suburb names appear whatsoever. You may get a pin in the right location if you searched for the suburb, but even then it will still preference LGAs before suburbs.

Here's what happens when you search for "Baulkham Hills":
IMG_0072.jpg


Baulkham Hills is a suburb in Sydney, but the LGA by the same name is particularly big - half of it is in suburban Sydney and the other half is some rural netherlands. I've highlighted the suburb of Baulkham Hills in red (the correct location) and the LGA in light red. The place the pin is dropped, and that Apple has labelled, is called Forest Glen, and like most of Australia, there's absolutely nothing there:

IMG_0072-b.jpg
 

Mairu

Member
Jellybean seems better then iOS 6, might jump ship next refresh

I've been thinking about it, but I'm too tied I to the infrastructure of Apples

Really was enjoying the Samsung Falaxy S3 I had the other day

I've been thinking about doing the same thing. I was originally set on waiting for the iPhone 5 and then getting that this year (I currently have a 4) but I might just see if I can hold off longer and get whatever is next in the Nexus line
 
I've been thinking about doing the same thing. I was originally set on waiting for the iPhone 5 and then getting that this year (I currently have a 4) but I might just see if I can hold off longer and get whatever is next in the Nexus line

Same

Isn't the New Nexus device not out this year?

I've got the four too, but it doesn't seem as if iOS 6 is pushing the envelope enough. In reality in kidding myself that it is anywhere close to android

The main things iOS still has over android is looks and logic. Some parts of android still look fucking comical, with horrible overlays, and of course there's the app situation. But it's getting better for android
 

Mairu

Member
Same

Isn't the New Nexus device not out this year?

I've got the four too, but it doesn't seem as if iOS 6 is pushing the envelope enough. In reality in kidding myself that it is anywhere close to android

The main things iOS still has over android is looks and logic. Some parts of android still look fucking comical, with horrible overlays, and of course there's the app situation. But it's getting better for android

I actually have no idea. I just assumed they followed a pattern similar to Apple and there would be a successor to the Galaxy Nexus this year. Maybe not? I still haven't really decided, I'm just not excited about iOS 6 at all whereas 4.1 looks pretty good.
 

noah111

Still Alive
TBH, I'm feeling the same way... after having my iPhone jailbroken, I don't think I can go back to not having these tweaks and waiting months again for another jailbreak.
Coming from a jailbroken iPhone, iOS 6 has been a sort of pain in the ass quite frankly. Nothing major, but these add up.

I mean, why can't I control the music playing, from the lock screen, without having to fuck with the double tap mechanism which is unreliable at times. I just want to quickly pause/skip etc, but each time I want to do that simple task, gotta double clickity click. Worst part is, even when I do double click, the spacing is such shit on those buttons that I often hit the wrong one (like skip track when I meant pause, fuuuu).

PS. made this mockup (for a verge post I did) showing how the playback controls should look in iOS 6 if they adopted the music app look and lose the whole need for double tapping; http://cl.ly/HudG

Second thing is brightness control, wtf must I go to the settings app and navigate to the wallpaper menu every time I want to adjust the damn thing. You would expect some consistency with iPad functionality allowing you to adjust it from the switcher. Another thing from the settings is wifi/3G/etc. I need my god damn toggles man. I've mocked it up before, but it isn't hard to implement right. Get on it Apple.

Meh, unintuitive imo. That entire animation needs to be re-thought anyway when they (imo inevitably) change the way you access notification center. I mean visually, not pulling it over everything but something else.

NC really fucked with the whole linen concept as well (not to mention a basic iOS ux philosophy).
 
I actually have no idea. I just assumed they followed a pattern similar to Apple and there would be a successor to the Galaxy Nexus this year. Maybe not? I still haven't really decided, I'm just not excited about iOS 6 at all whereas 4.1 looks pretty good.

I thought they normally release at their I/O conference. Anyway, I might buy the G.Nexus next month if the next iterations of the iOS 6 beta doesn't show enough to keep me

I still have my iPad anyway
 

Fowler

Member
Anyone else having iMessage problems? Keeps saying activation unsuccessful... this after sending iMessages just fine for ages, not after a reboot, just suddenly asked me for my password then disabled iMessage. Really odd.
 
Top Bottom