About the map itself, here's a comparison with our own base style on the location in Scotland of the last capture.
Normal style : https://cartes.app/#16.13/57.290344/-6.171279 Outdoor style : https://cartes.app/?style=outdoors&terrain=oui#16.13/57.2903...
It's interesting to see the wide variations that can be designed. May styling is choosing between an infinity of possibilities !
As an aside there's a screenshot in the article showing the Hidden Valley at Glen Coe, which happens to be one of my favourite short walks in Scotland.
A less happy aside of that aside is the house at the base of the valley. I used to look at it dreamily as we drove past, always closed up, nestled by itself in a remote nook between the mountains. What an extraordinary place it would be to live. The park for the hike was only a couple of hundred metres up the road. A few years later I recognised the house in a Louis Theroux doco, when he travelled there with its owner - TV personality Jimmy Saville. Wow. And then a few years later again, after I'd returned to Australia, it came out, posthumous, that Saville was one of the UK's most prolific child and sexual predators. Horrific stuff. The name and outline of the cottage structure can actually be seen at the top of the map in the screenshot.
So unlike Apple Maps, which is dynamically rendered, it basically shows image tiles. It allows for a nicer-looking, more detailed map, but affects things like needing separate downloads for different zoom levels, rotation, updatability.
His original map provider offers both vector and raster tile services: https://www.thunderforest.com/maps/outdoors/
A common pattern is to use a vector tile service + style definition directly or to generate raster tiles if those are desired.
The 8 is the version number that launched yesterday with this feature
But it was not possible from the app store page itself. Have a look, how confusing it is:
https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@ndr/116483475865871622
It shows a lot of price points from 1€ all up to 45€ without saying if its a subscription or a one-time payment.
Maybe the author should include the pricing clearly somewhere else on the app store page as apple is not able to do so.
edit: spelling
And there is no way for the app to mark "this is the current pricing".
The map tracking features cost $29.95 a year.
Yet the app is published and has a great App Store review score of 4.8 with 170k+ reviews, and same score with 35k+ reviews for the Watch.
How does the author get feedback and respond to other customers? Or is this simply scratching one's own itch demonstrating its usefulness for others once again?
It’s a lifestyle device after all but still
I remember a time when Apple was chided for integrating functionalities of popular apps into its OS.
Apple created an incredibly awesome device, and its up to the market to make full use of its potential. Why would it be a failure for Apple to not make such an app?
In that light, I may be hard pressed to call it a debacle, but it’s still third-rate.
Also Garmin's own maps are based on OpenStreetMap and have become pretty good.
Also worth mentioning (probably the same with Coros) that these are offline maps, so they always work, and you typically install them for a whole continent.
I regularly use hiking and topography maps on my Apple Watch with the first party maps app, so it sure what you’re talking about
Where they fall short though, the App Store is right there. There’s almost always a better alternative for those who value having something better.
That alternative comes with a $60/year subscription these days, though.
I’m surprised to hear people at Apple work on this because surely they must encounter this issue.
If this guys maps can somehow take the screen and hold it, I think he’s got a killer feature for me. Though I glanced at the App Store page and it wasn’t clear to me which features are subscription gated and which ones aren’t and I despise apps that won’t tell me till I’ve set everything up (it just feels so frustrating that it wasn’t clear ahead of time) so I’ll probably just endure and try to remember to start a workout manually so it won’t take over.
BTW, that last line about hiring/commissioning a cartographer, very rad and cool :~)
After a few retries it put me on a 2 hour timeout.
I had to get back to my room. I knew the way back on foot well enough, about 30 minutes away, but I wanted to take a look at the map anyway.
I thought I'd try it on my Apple Watch Ultra 3. It was a few months ago so it was the latest OS.
There were a few bugs in trying to do that simple task, like when typing out the name of a location the keyboard kept disappearing as if the UI was crashing or something.
I sighed, muttered a few curses at the state of things and the people in charge who let it get this way, and lowered my wrist and just enjoyed the stroll.
Like so many things in Apple software since the past 5 or so years, so much shit just doesn't work when you REALLY need it. F'n hell
Certainly not going to hold my wrist up to my mouth on a noisy street and yell at my watch until it gets the names of foreign streets right lol
This would presumably transfer the need to host map data back to the author, which would represent an ongoing cost, and therefore maybe justify a modest subscription?
