Google ruins everything they touch

The new google maps is absolute crap - not just the mapmaker overlay. It's busy, slow, full of bells and whistles I don't want and lacking in features I need. The local search function is reprehensible, always seeming to miss something obvious.

My only guess is that the old maps, perfectly functional, was no longer a useful enough vehicle for delivery of advertisements.
 
cozzyd said:
Fortunately gmail works fine with an imap client (although I'm pretty sure I'm the only person I know who still uses an e-mail client...)
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eudora.gif


Kidding. I begrudgingly use Thunderbird, which never seems to get any better at integrating my google contacts/calendars.
 
As of yesterday, Classic Google Maps no longer opens on my home desktop. Still opens Classic on my work computer though. Only the new maps, and a "lite" version of the new maps on my home computer. RIP Google Maps. You *were* amazing.
 
^Your signature is especially relevant here.

Alas. I too shall miss the old Maps.
 
Why can I not turn off street labels?!?!?!
 
That feature is only available on Google Earth. I think because they assume you would want to see road names if you are looking at Google Maps.
 
If you're in the Satellite/Earth section of Maps, click the gear icon in the bottom right to remove labels.

What do people have against the new maps? It was very buggy in beta, but seems great now.
 
Justin7 said:
If you're in the Satellite/Earth section of Maps, click the gear icon in the bottom right to remove labels.

What do people have against the new maps? It was very buggy in beta, but seems great now.
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Mainly the much clunkier interface that buries stuff I use all time like the measuring tool and link button that used to be right there onscreen with one click. I don't want to motion over or pull up panels to find stuff. Same "mobilefication" of desktop UX design that's making so many Google products (and non-Google products...Firefox, I'm looking in your direction) progressively less intuitive than they used to be. I'm a desktop power user who wants all my toolbars and shit onscreen with minimum clicks. If I needed to view it on a tablet with a tablet interface I'd use I'd use a damn tablet and the mobile version. I stuck with Classic Maps until literally a couple days ago when it stopped working.

Also, the measuring tool is way more cumbersome than it used to be and has quirky, unpredictable behavior that still needs to be ironed out. I haven't checked if the links work right and have gained 'stickiness' with the street view and 45-degree angle rotation. It annoyed the hell out of me that those didn't work for the longest time. At least it's all more or less stable now and has tamed the photo panel and Google+ force-feeding to no longer shove all that right in my face upon opening.


But still...they've had, what, a year to debug this thing since it went live? It's pathetic that it had to be opt-out instead of opt-in for that long a time with a bug list 10 miles long, and still isn't totally at the "it just works" level of Classic. Have standards for what's ready for prime time and what's not really slipped that far where this is acceptable? Remember when you could choose not to use the beta-grade Google products when they were being retooled?


If there's one good thing to come out of this past year it's that OpenStreetMap has improved by leaps and bounds thanks to all the new contributors who streamed over to that project aghast at the quality control on Google. We're only a couple years away from having a feature-complete open source equivalent.
 
Different tastes I guess. I think the old interface is clunky compared to the new one. I also think the measurement tool is improved, and I'd hardly call something in the right click menu "buried."

(I use Firefox regularly. No idea how it works in IE, but you don't sound like an IE user.)
 
Justin7 said:
Different tastes I guess. I think the old interface is clunky compared to the new one. I also think the measurement tool is improved, and I'd hardly call something in the right click menu "buried."

(I use Firefox regularly. No idea how it works in IE, but you don't sound like an IE user.)
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Omg! I had no idea there was a right click menu!! I've been wondering how people measure distances on Google Maps for so long!

The measurement tool is quite intuitive. The way the segments work is great.
 
Justin7 said:
Different tastes I guess. I think the old interface is clunky compared to the new one. I also think the measurement tool is improved, and I'd hardly call something in the right click menu "buried."

(I use Firefox regularly. No idea how it works in IE, but you don't sound like an IE user.)
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Measurement tool is herky-jerky, (yesterday at least) was having trouble flying in the wrong direction with imprecise clicks, the 'stickiness' to roads is sometimes unpredictable, and where before you could reliably grab the 'hand' to move the map before drawing another measuring leg now it sometimes draws instead of grabs. Also hate that the visual indicators (green for starting end, red for end) on the measuring tool aren't there anymore; that's a UX regression where they reinvented a wheel that didn't need it.

Many people are going to discover it for the first time, though, because you had to go into settings and enable the old one as a Labs addon. But goddamn, was the Classic one indispensible. You just clicked a button to turn it on/off, and the left panel on the screen had a big fat counter with radio dialog buttons for switching between English/metric units. It was all right there on the surface, no layers of clicking. It's only because I used that one so much over the last 4 years that it was available that I notice how much intuitiveness was lost by this reinvent-the-wheel new one. Even though it's now enabled by default.

Map scrolling in general was also choppy yesterday, although it seems improved this morning.


The type of glitchy behavior I'm getting is very much the type you get variances on with differing browsing engines. And not necessarily because one rendering engine is less-precise than another, though IE is certainly a lot more standards-strict than before (I just hate how non-extensible the whole platform is; I'm too much of a power user to give up my FF extensions). It's *just* flaky enough in FF to be noticeable as an inferior replacement. I've seen enough Chrome users bitch and moan about it continued glitchiness on the Google Product Forums that I don't think Google's own browser has quite got it right.

After a year of debugging you'd think they'd have this thing more thoroughly tested than this on all 3 of the browser rendering engines: WebKit/Blink for Chrome, Safari, Opera, and some of the no-name Linux browsers; Gecko for FF; and Trident for IE. As debug oversights go, this is real rinky-dink quality control.
 
I have actually had problems with the new Google Maps in Chrome which has surprised me, given that it should be flawless in their own browser. Often, the maps/satellite/exit StreetView toggle in the lower left corner just doesn't work/is non-responsive.

I was trying desperately to switch out of StreetView yesterday (back to the map) and it kept just clicking around the StreetView. I ended up INSIDE a nail salon on Bromfield St and then, I kid you not, on the 8th floor of the DSW building (apparently Alden Galleries, Inc). I had no idea you could even go inside businesses/buildings! You can (since last year) and they are shown as orange dots on the map when you are holding the StreetView guy.
 
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datadyne007 said:
I have actually had problems with the new Google Maps in Chrome which has surprised me, given that it should be flawless in their own browser. Often, the maps/satellite/exit StreetView toggle in the lower left corner just doesn't work/is non-responsive.

I was trying desperately to switch out of StreetView yesterday (back to the map) and it kept just clicking around the StreetView. I ended up INSIDE a nail salon on Bromfield St and then, I kid you not, on the 8th FLOOR of the DSW building (apparently Alden Galleries, Inc). I had no idea you could even go inside businesses/buildings! You can and they are shown as orange dots on the map when you are holding the StreetView guy.
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Yeah, Street View's got some unpredictability too. Mousing to the area onscreen where it turns to zoom instead of grab/rotate is inconsistent, positioning the movement arrows is inconsistent; instead of having 2 floating arrows forward/reverse you've now got the one rotateable one, and sometimes it doesn't rotate exactly like your mouse gesture intends it to. And sometimes when you click on the arrows to move up a frame it really sails on you 3 or 4 frames up the street requiring a backtrack. Moving the guy around to drop on a street sometimes doesn't work. Sometimes it puts you on the wrong block. Sometimes it doesn't work at all in Earth mode and you either have to switch to Maps or switch Earth-Maps-Earth to reset it in Earth mode.

About the only thing that's substantially improved with Street View is that you can land more accurately on the right road now when highway ramps are stacked above/below the street grid. I used to hate that mousing around the Greenway always defaulted to I-93 when I wanted surface, requiring me to drop the guy at the last frame on a side street then frame + frame through an intersection.



Yeah...rinky-dink debugging. And I'm as surprised as you are that Chrome users seem to be faring no better than Firefox users on the remaining bug list.
 
Wasn't there a right-click menu on Classic maps, too? Pretty sure there was. It was only missing the measuring tool and "What's nearby?", IIRC. And why could that be added to Classic? The new and "improved" Google Maps loads slow as hell. Sometimes I'm trying to fly through and quickly check on something. Not anymore...
 
BostonUrbEx said:
Wasn't there a right-click menu on Classic maps, too? Pretty sure there was. It was only missing the measuring tool and "What's nearby?", IIRC. And why could that be added to Classic? The new and "improved" Google Maps loads slow as hell. Sometimes I'm trying to fly through and quickly check on something. Not anymore...
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In Classic if you were logged in and went to settings there was a Labs tab with a bunch of extra doodads you could enable. Measuring tool, the ability to do the shortened URL link-out, latitude/longitude mouse-over tooltips, "What's Around Here?" maps view (dotted the most oft-searched commercial addresses on the screen), drag-and-zoom tool, smart zoom (auto-zoom to the most detailed view that has available imagery), and had skeletal amounts of aerial imagery to enable before Satellite view got its 45-degree angle mode. And it was all right there no more than 1 click away onscreen, unlike now where everything's nested or takes more clicks to execute.

Most of it's been folded into the new Maps and some went obsolete when new features were added to Classic, but it's infuriating that the reinvent-the-wheel crap like the measuring tool perform so much worse in the new version than what they've had for damn near 5 years in Classic Labs. With such inferior UX design. For example, having a different shaped/colored starting target on the measurement tool from the ending target, and a separate counter for the actual distance count that stayed on the same part of the screen the whole time, had one-click switch from English to metric units right next to the counter, and didn't require squinting at the measure line at a tilted-angle readout to get the counts. The same functionality is there today, but those are UX regressions because they re-coded from scratch what didn't need to be done from scratch and left a bunch of those finer touches out. If you have to squint to get a readout or tell the starting target apart from the ending target--where you never did before on the old measuring tool--that's a usability regression.

Amateur hour. Not as amateurish as the bugs still lingering after a full year of debugging, but amateurish all the same.
 
F-Line to Dudley said:
In Classic if you were logged in and went to settings there was a Labs tab with a bunch of extra doodads you could enable. Measuring tool, the ability to do the shortened URL link-out, latitude/longitude mouse-over tooltips, "What's Around Here?" maps view (dotted the most oft-searched commercial addresses on the screen), drag-and-zoom tool, smart zoom (auto-zoom to the most detailed view that has available imagery), and had skeletal amounts of aerial imagery to enable before Satellite view got its 45-degree angle mode. And it was all right there no more than 1 click away onscreen, unlike now where everything's nested or takes more clicks to execute.

Most of it's been folded into the new Maps and some went obsolete when new features were added to Classic, but it's infuriating that the reinvent-the-wheel crap like the measuring tool perform so much worse in the new version than what they've had for damn near 5 years in Classic Labs. With such inferior UX design. For example, having a different shaped/colored starting target on the measurement tool from the ending target, and a separate counter for the actual distance count that stayed on the same part of the screen the whole time, had one-click switch from English to metric units right next to the counter, and didn't require squinting at the measure line at a tilted-angle readout to get the counts. The same functionality is there today, but those are UX regressions because they re-coded from scratch what didn't need to be done from scratch and left a bunch of those finer touches out. If you have to squint to get a readout or tell the starting target apart from the ending target--where you never did before on the old measuring tool--that's a usability regression.

Amateur hour. Not as amateurish as the bugs still lingering after a full year of debugging, but amateurish all the same.
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It sounds like you and some of the others are clearly power users and could provide valuable input to Google in order to help them possibly craft a specialized version of Maps for those who make and analyze maps. Have you or anyone else contacted Google and suggested this beyond "give me back my old maps?"

I find it silly that some here are expecting Google Maps to cater to their very specialized personal interests rather than the majority of users.
 
datadyne007 said:
It sounds like you and some of the others are clearly power users and could provide valuable input to Google in order to help them possibly craft a specialized version of Maps for those who make and analyze maps. Have you or anyone else contacted Google and suggested this beyond "give me back my old maps?"

I find it silly that some here are expecting Google Maps to cater to their very specialized personal interests rather than the majority of users.
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The Google Product Forums are chock full of users who actually code in Maps API's screaming about all this to the devs and filing bug reports. Not only for the usability regressions but for how much it breaks the API's. Which is way more serious when people's websites and commercial products rely on the API's functioning like they're supposed to in Google's own documentation. It's either been met with silence or Google's devs closing the bug reports and marking them irrelevant or no-change.

That's a much bigger sin than coding an inferior measuring tool. Think of any useful site that layers something cool and useful onto Maps because somebody custom-built some code in the API's. And now it's a crapshoot whether that cool stuff even works right, and Google isn't responding to these devs on how to fix their sites. Hell, it hasn't even updated the documentation. There's still Help FAQ pages referencing Classic on there. They spent 5 years cultivating this whole API's ecosystem with vibrant support and now are all "we're just not that into you."

That's a way bigger sin than just a nitpicky usability regression. Shit on your third-party devs and people don't make cool stuff with it anymore on "fool me once. . ." grounds. Apparently this is what they want: complete walled-garden control and restrictions on what third-parties can do. Fine...Apple does that as their choice. But Apple did it from Day 1; that was always understood. They didn't cultivate the dev community to critical mass like Google did then leave them hanging out to dry. Even "Developers! Developers! Developers!" Microsoft isn't that careless.
 
F-Line to Dudley said:
In Classic if you were logged in and went to settings there was a Labs tab with a bunch of extra doodads you could enable. Measuring tool, the ability to do the shortened URL link-out, latitude/longitude mouse-over tooltips, "What's Around Here?" maps view (dotted the most oft-searched commercial addresses on the screen), drag-and-zoom tool, smart zoom (auto-zoom to the most detailed view that has available imagery), and had skeletal amounts of aerial imagery to enable before Satellite view got its 45-degree angle mode. And it was all right there no more than 1 click away onscreen, unlike now where everything's nested or takes more clicks to execute.

Most of it's been folded into the new Maps and some went obsolete when new features were added to Classic, but it's infuriating that the reinvent-the-wheel crap like the measuring tool perform so much worse in the new version than what they've had for damn near 5 years in Classic Labs. With such inferior UX design. For example, having a different shaped/colored starting target on the measurement tool from the ending target, and a separate counter for the actual distance count that stayed on the same part of the screen the whole time, had one-click switch from English to metric units right next to the counter, and didn't require squinting at the measure line at a tilted-angle readout to get the counts. The same functionality is there today, but those are UX regressions because they re-coded from scratch what didn't need to be done from scratch and left a bunch of those finer touches out. If you have to squint to get a readout or tell the starting target apart from the ending target--where you never did before on the old measuring tool--that's a usability regression.

Amateur hour. Not as amateurish as the bugs still lingering after a full year of debugging, but amateurish all the same.
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I understand complaining about bugs. I haven't experienced any since Maps left beta, but if you have you should definitely report them. However, calling the changes UX regressions because you don't like them is silly.

The total measurement distance is in the top left corner in both imperial AND metric units so it went from 1-click to 0-clicks. If you are having trouble seeing the units directly on the map then you can zoom the entire page.

Personally, I miss the 45% photo imagery, but can admit that 3D mapping makes more sense for a maps application, and the quality is amazing.

Regarding people complaining on the Google forums: This happens with virtually every single change that takes place in popular software regardless of how good or bad the change itself is. It's not "amateur hour" it's just something you don't personally like.
 
Justin7 said:
I understand complaining about bugs. I haven't experienced any since Maps left beta, but if you have you should definitely report them. However, calling the changes UX regressions because you don't like them is silly.

The total measurement distance is in the top left corner in both imperial AND metric units so it went from 1-click to 0-clicks. If you are having trouble seeing the units directly on the map then you can zoom the entire page.

Personally, I miss the 45% photo imagery, but can admit that 3D mapping makes more sense for a maps application, and the quality is amazing.

Regarding people complaining on the Google forums: This happens with virtually every single change that takes place in popular software regardless of how good or bad the change itself is. It's not "amateur hour" it's just something you don't personally like.
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Then you don't understand what a UX regression is. If it breaks the API's people build their custom Maps products around, it's a pretty big frickin' problem. The glitches are annoying for casual power users, but I certainly don't have my own business revenue or website accessibility riding on a GIS tool I coded in the Maps API that got broken by this change with Google devs going mute on workarounds. That's where the biggest complaints are, and where the complaints are being ignored. That is not silly.

How many links have been shared on AB over the years from some site where somebody has done something really new and useful with Maps embedding? Those are the sites that typically have some self-coded Maps API code extending the Maps functionality. And now those are the sites dealing with a crapshoot of broken functionality because they force-rolled involuntarily out of Classic without fixing stuff, without saying how they're going to fix the regressions, without offering workarounds for the breaks, and without given any statement with follow-through. Burning your third-party devs like that is one of the worst cardinal sins a platform-provider can commit. Google has for reasons unknown adopted that as S.O.P. these days.

It kills their crowdsourcing momentum dead. It means fewer people are going to be developing cool Maps extensions or contributing code. It means broken sites are going to become abandonware when people don't have time to make fixes to stuff Google broke, or when Google won't even provide documentation on a workaround. They already did this once by dropping the Earth browser plugin and API cold, then reneging on their promise to support it for 1 full year after the sunsetting. That API at least didn't have as many products built around it, but some of the ones that were were extremely powerful. And now they're all abandonware. Some highly motivated developers will find other ways to do it, switch to competing platforms products and try to backfill the functionality gaps vs. Google's product, or grit their teeth and continue putting up with Google and the risk that they're going to get upended again. Others don't have the time, or just don't want to deal with the aggravation...and that's the end of their tools.

Why Google seems to prefer doing business like this is unfathomable. Like I said, if they want a walled garden like Apple...start out from Day 1 with a walled garden where the rules are clear for everyone. Don't aggressively cultivate community development then yank the rug out from under them and refuse to explain oneself.


At least this means OpenStreetMap is going to get a shot in the arm and a lot of the same API functionality that Maps has so the devs doing the cool stuff have a place to do their cool stuff without risk of being at mercy of one fickle overlord.
 
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