Google Maps Gains Enhanced Street-Level Detail in Four Major Cities
Google Maps has quietly been updated to include significantly more detailed street-level information in a handful of key cities around the world.
Upon zooming in, Google's maps for Central London, Tokyo, San Francisco, and New York now benefit from shapes and widths that match the scale of roads more accurately.
Meanwhile, enhanced graphical representations of sidewalks, crosswalks, pedestrian islands, and street-side flora have also been added, which should help users who rely on the maps for walking directions.
Lastly, parks now show the actual width of pathways in dark green along with any stairs in grey, offering improved accessibility information for wheelchair users or people with a stroller.
Some of the improvements are undoubtedly subtle, but underline Google's commitment to improving city-wide coverage. The changes are server-side and therefore require no software update, and Google says it plans to expand the new details to additional cities in the future.
Google Maps can be downloaded from the App Store for free. [Direct Link]
(Via AndroidPolice.)
Popular Stories
Apple is set to unveil iOS 18 during its WWDC keynote on June 10, so the software update is a little over six weeks away from being announced. Below, we recap rumored features and changes planned for the iPhone with iOS 18. iOS 18 will reportedly be the "biggest" update in the iPhone's history, with new ChatGPT-inspired generative AI features, a more customizable Home Screen, and much more....
Apple today released several open source large language models (LLMs) that are designed to run on-device rather than through cloud servers. Called OpenELM (Open-source Efficient Language Models), the LLMs are available on the Hugging Face Hub, a community for sharing AI code. As outlined in a white paper [PDF], there are eight total OpenELM models, four of which were pre-trained using the...
Apple has announced it will be holding a special event on Tuesday, May 7 at 7 a.m. Pacific Time (10 a.m. Eastern Time), with a live stream to be available on Apple.com and on YouTube as usual. The event invitation has a tagline of "Let Loose" and shows an artistic render of an Apple Pencil, suggesting that iPads will be a focus of the event. Subscribe to the MacRumors YouTube channel for more ...
There are widespread reports of Apple users being locked out of their Apple ID overnight for no apparent reason, requiring a password reset before they can log in again. Users say the sudden inexplicable Apple ID sign-out is occurring across multiple devices. When they attempt to sign in again they are locked out of their account and asked to reset their password in order to regain access. ...
Best Buy is discounting a collection of M3 MacBook Pro computers today, this time focusing on the 14-inch version of the laptop. Every deal in this sale requires you to have a My Best Buy Plus or Total membership, although non-members can still get solid second-best prices on these MacBook Pro models. Note: MacRumors is an affiliate partner with Best Buy. When you click a link and make a...
Apple used to regularly increase the base memory of its Macs up until 2011, the same year Tim Cook was appointed CEO, charts posted on Mastodon by David Schaub show. Earlier this year, Schaub generated two charts: One showing the base memory capacities of Apple's all-in-one Macs from 1984 onwards, and a second depicting Apple's consumer laptop base RAM from 1999 onwards. Both charts were...
Top Rated Comments
“Apple releases new 3D flyovers in four major cities. This is what everyone cares about - the flyovers. Right? RIGHT?!”
It has gotten so much better in the States that for the third time I am using it as my main navigation app, in the past I tried and it was just not on par with the competition, I can see the improvements now.
It still has a long way to go, they could work on:
1. Better handling of pins and coordinates, this is important for professionals like geologists, engineers, biologists, etc.
2. More detailed turn-by-turn navigation, it is still behind the precision and detail offered by Google Maps. Apple Maps sometimes tells me "the next exit" I have to take but it would not tell me the exit number, which is something I would like to know in advance.
3. Public transportation implementation. Even though I can find routes in my city, some of them are even routes that have been eliminated. In contrast Google Maps tells me exactly where the bus is in REAL TIME, I can literally track it and not just rely on an ETA.
4. And most importantly: OFFLINE functionality. Several mapping apps in the store offer me to download maps for offline usage, but Apple Maps will not let me do that, it is frustrating as I work on the field constantly and cellphone reception is not available most of the time.
they are free to take photos of my street and obscure faces and license plates just like google does.
That old trope that gets pedalled around here is so tired.