Before I upgraded my iOS, I'd come to rely on Maps as a regular part of my life and couldn't live without it. But now it's just a painful experience.
This is the algorithm gone extraordinarily wrong. I really wonder if the guys who make decisions to change the UI or functionality of highly rated apps ever take time to really use their own creation. Because if they did, I don't see how they'd continue with their botched modifications to what was once a great app.
I haven't been able to figure out a repeatable way to get this to happen, but it seems to have started happening in the last few weeks. Rebooting the phone usually makes it go away, but only for a short while. I haven't seen this weird keyboard disappearing behavior in any other app, so it makes me think it's something specific to Google Maps. It's making the app pretty much unusable.
Anyone else seeing this?
So now it's supposed to be ~1 way of sharing for all products. Latitude was location sharing, therefore the sharing should be integrated with G+. Normally doing the sharing via G+ wouldn't completely obsolete a product, but if _all_ a product does is share, it's ripe to be a feature of G+ rather than it's own product. That's what happened here.
Google is largely associated with innovation and they make everything to keep this image, but at the bottom their business is actually pretty boring: finding ways to show you an ad.
Is it? I don't see any quality advertisement on Facebook or Twitter.
Never mistake a means for an end. Today, just like yesterday and tomorrow, advertisers want to make money and/or get publicity. What changes is how they can get there (or, many a time, how they _think_ they can get there). Today, that's through advertising on social media.
You've inadvertently summed up everything wrong with google and google+. Somewhere google lowered the bar for its products to "don't do something too bad" instead of "build remarkable things."
Google+ may not be bad per se, but it's far from exceptional. When you take something that isn't exceptional and begin forcing it on your users for the sake of strategy, I'll make a bet that it hurts your company long term. Of course, when you build something exceptional(such as gmail), you don't have to shove it onto your users because you've crazy inbound demand.
http://www.life360.com/latitude
We're also working on some new features that will make the app less "family oriented" and more universal for everyone.
There is a problem Error calling GET https://www.googleapis.com/latitude/v1/currentLocation?granu...: (404) Not Found
Here's the link from the post: https://support.google.com/plus/answer/2998354?p=plus_locati...
We passively track how you spend your time – you don't have to do anything, and it lets you know where you’ve gone, with whom, and breaks your time into categories (work, sleep, exercise, home, social, etc.).
-charlie
As someone who used to use latitude occasionally to get together and find friends (fairs, small towns)I think I'll miss it.
while amazingly providing less information
I'm glad they kept that, I find it quite handy for several things, including as a cross check on how much time I spend at $client.
var time = time=new Date("2010/01/01").getTime(); //set this to start date
setInterval(function(){
window.location="https://maps.google.com/locationhistory/b/0/kml?startTime=" + time + "&endTime=" + (time + 2678400000);
time += 2678400000
}, 2000)
Also he offers plenty of behind the scenes reasoning in replies to the thread, such as this:
"We felt that we'd be able to get quicker feature parity and better newer features by cutting over now than waiting."
Sharing location on G+ is not the same use case at all.
As the Google wind-down goes on, I've lost all trust in them to keep any of their services running. I won't invest any more time into a new Google service anymore. The only question right now is Google Apps email. I like their Gmail iOS app, but I might switch to another ActiveSync provider (for iOS push support).
The problem with it though was it was slow, thus typically outdated. So 90% of the time the information was simply not useful.
Lets explain it with a real use case, I want to meet my friend at an open air music festival with a lot of attendees. The classic way of doing it is calling him, but with the heavy music we will barely understand each other, plus it will be difficult to describe where we are to meet.
That's where the application will help : you select the contact you want to meet, it sends a SMS (or use the share dialog) requesting its location. The text contains a link to a site allowing any decent smartphone (even iOS/Blackberry/Windows Phone) to geolocalize him. Once done, you will get a notification on your phone displaying him on a map !
That's the beginning of the app, we've got a full backlog of ideas for the upcoming releases. Meanwhile, feel free to install, use, and tell what you would have loved to see in it.