For a start, this is where I live:
Pretty grey, huh? Actually, I don't live next to a river of liquid mercury; that's the river trent snaking across the nature reserve at Attenborough, a designated SSSI (Site of Special Scientific Interest), frequented by bird watchers, fishermen, ramblers and often British Trust Conservation Volunteers. In the summer many people come and walk their dogs here, or families take their bikes down the towpath. It's a beautiful place, and if you use iOS 6 Maps, you'd hardly even know about it.
Still, a thing don't need to be pretty, so long as you can get from A to B, which is the raison d'être of a Maps app. Yeah, about that ...
Right, like many people I don't own a car. The public transport in the Nottingham area is pretty good, and I can commute to Nottingham on the train, or catch a bus into Beeston town centre for shopping. On Google Maps it was always pretty straight forward to get bus or train times, and they were always accurate. Not so with Apple's Map app.
Lets say I want a bus to Beeston: there's a bus stop a minute's walk away, so lets look for bus times:
Right, it can't do that. And all the apps (another app within the app?) it suggests don't work either. So I need a different maps app.
Ok, let's suppose I actually did have a car. I need petrol. I ask Siri to take me to the nearest petrol station. Here's what I get:
County Stores - where it is taking me to - is a small grocery store. It sells bread, beer, fags, sweets. It has never ever been a petrol station. I reported this fail to Apple 13 days ago, and nothing has changed. I guess they got bigger fish to fry.
Derby road is about 2 miles from me. It has one petrol station. According to the Apple maps app, the petrol station doesn't exist. What's more, it thinks two others do exist on the same road. One has never been a petrol station, the other has been closed for over ten years.
It thinks The Brown Cow is a public house in Beeston - it's been closed for the last five years, and for last year it has been a petrol station. You couldn't make it up.
It's unaware of the train station in Beeston - it was opened in 1839. It's unaware of the train station in Nottingham, which has a population of 690,000 people.
We have no 3D buildings in Beeston, and I can live with that. But there is nothing of substance that's useful in Apple's Maps application to give me any confidence in using it. I can't believe how awful it is. I can't get past how arrogant Apple were to remove the perfectly good Google Maps app on iOS 5. I feel angry every time I think about it, and I honestly think that in Cupertino they couldn't give a crap about me. It's almost like the Maps app shouldn't be that much of a useful part of my phone, that it doesn't matter so much if it's completely unusable.
Or perhaps I should give up on public transport, buy a car that doesn't need petrol, and live with my vision always being in the dark.
- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad
