Imagine if we found an ancient monastery hidden deep inside a mountain and containing 100 books. Then we found a note from the copyist saying that most stuff wasn't worth preserving so these are only the 100 books he liked the most out of 10,000
How can you have a content-blocking browser that only allows one single tab at a time?
It happens so many times that while browsing an ad-heavy page an ad gets opened in a new tab (since Firefox fails to block it), but since it's a mono-tab browser it simply replaces the one I was browsing.
Call me back when 1TB smartphones are $150. Until then, these formats are a life saver. Maybe instead of dragging everyone down you could champion for programs to better their support?
The funniest thing to me is that Google Maps seems to be the "normal person" option and yet only OSM tells me where water fountains are.
Millions of tourists worldwide use GMaps to navigate around in foreign places and yet they have no option to see where the closest place to refill their bottles is? Especially in the summer?
Probably because 99% of normal people "don't refill their water bottles" (and surely not off of water fountains), just buy bottled water and/or drink when they stop at cafes and restaurants?
Not saying it's good. In fact, it's quite bad and harmful. But it just is.
Nah, it's just that 99% of people aren't so chronically online as to need a web service to find out how to freely drink water in a place with free water drinking infrastructure.
The extremely detailed mapping of drinking water on OSM that the OP alludes to, is more helpful than you assume. If you are cycling or hiking in baking-hot Southern Europe, or wandering through some picturesque villages, there are often springs hidden just off the trail that most people would never spot, if the map didn’t alert people to their presence. Also, with OSM one doesn’t need to be “chronically online” and use a “web service”, because various apps allow using OSM fully offline.
This is very location dependant. In southern Europe there are places where most normal people actually would refill their water at the fountain when going through a town, and I have even faced small queues when the fountain is small but a slightly larger group is refilling bottles. In many small towns you don't even have a shop so buying bottles is not even an option. There's sometimes a local bar / restaurant but if you want to just get water that's a bit overkill.
Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and flamebait? You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
People reading in good faith understand what 99% means (it, as well as 95% etc., are commonly used that way, to mean "overwhelming majority"). Besides, if I wanted to write the actual number, which I happen to know, I'd have written 92,768%.
In any case, you don't have to justify the rudeness, a simple "sorry" would have sufficed.
“99%” when used like this is essentially an expression in English, for “almost all” or “almost certain.” It is very hard to believe that they have the actual statistic or that it happens to be exactly 99%, so I wouldn’t worry about anybody getting mixed up.
Google Maps often misses paths in parks that OSM has. I don't mean obscure trails deep in national forests, I mean paved paths in city parks. Google maps seems optimized for directing people to businesses that might advertise with Google, anything else languishes.
Worse, Google makes it really difficult for government GIS admins to upload the correct data. Last time I looked, if you ever want to update the bike/ped paths (like when a new one is constructed) they want you to upload ONLY the new part. This is really time consuming to extract only the new data, especially if you have multiple paths to update at the same time which are not connected. The sensible thing would be to just upload the entire path network for a city anytime there is an update, but apparently Google does not want you to do this.
Apple Maps is even worse, I don't think they even offer a way to update incorrect data -- not that I've been able to find. And it's super frustrating to use, because Apple Maps does not have a "Bicycle" layer that you can turn on and off to find pathways. They only appear if you plan a route. Totally idiotic.
> Millions of tourists worldwide use GMaps to navigate around in foreign places and yet they have no option to see where the closest place to refill their bottles is? Especially in the summer?
It’s almost like this isn’t a thing folks are actually looking for.
Why is it that whenever somebody comes up with a clear cut and reasonable shortcoming of a big tech product, there's a mass of sycophants that crawl out of the ground to say "nobody wants that, you're just a weirdo"?
Everybody drinks water. It often isn't intuitively obvious where you can find water. Even in city parks, water fountains may not be where you expect but often are where you wouldn't. Google maps also sucks at finding bathrooms. Everybody pisses, even cyborgs.
I thought to try searching "public toilet" in Copenhagen, which I'm sure is something tourists search for.
It does show a few of them, but it also shows an apartment complex miscategorized as one, and misses several within the city centre. They are shown with various names ("Toilet", "Public toilet", "Public toilet for men", "Public restroom") so I think this is crowdsourced, rather than anything Google has made an effort to map.
Although the interface of https://www.openstreetmap.org/ doesn't have a way to highlight them, other interfaces (phone apps etc) can, and OSM has much better coverage.
I don't care where are water fountains, but what bus/train/metro can I take to go to another place, where is the bus stop. At what time does arrive, and which bus stop do I need to get down.
I can do that only on google maps. Open Street Map does not provide that info. Now I am sure there are some local app I can use for each individual city that works fine. But with google maps I only need to have one app.
As user, that is what is valuable for me. I honestly dont care about how clutter is the interface.
It's annoying, but if you are serious about taking public transit, you really do need to use the apps for whatever city you are in to get accurate information in my experience. Yes, Google Maps will tell you when a bus or metro is coming, but they often get it wrong, claiming that buses that run only on weekdays run on Saturday and so on.
Even if google maps is right, it isn't helpful to how people ride transit. Do you want to ride the 4 or 9 or 99? It doesn't matter, all of them go to where I'm going, but I have to choose when really I should just go to the stop and catch the first bus. This is a real situation for me where I selected the 4, but it turns out that it went by half a block before I reached the stop, and google maps got mad when I got on the 9 even though they both go exactly the same place (by a somewhat different route in between that didn't matter)
I haven't found city specific transit apps any more helpful, but I don't have much experience with them. google maps sucks is terrible for the job though.
Right. Last I tried, it's terribly difficult to get Google maps to show you directions for a bus route you just jumped on (and so it thinks you'll miss if you try to board).
The Transportr app[0], which is Free Software and even on F-Droid, shows public transit directions for a number of cities around the world. There is now a standardized format for transit routing and timetables, and transit authorities freely share it, so for those cities Google has no especial monopoly in that regard.
What would you say?
What would any historian say?