[x0054]

So I am not crazy after all! The other day I was driving in Palm Springs, and I was using Google Maps. I literally had to zoom in until the road I was on almost completely field the screen before it would show me the name of the road or the roads around it. They did something to their display algorithm where you now have to zoom almost entirely into an area to see anything about the area, very inconvenient.

[SiVal]

It drives me crazy that I can't find half of the labels I'm looking for, and when I do, I can't increase the size of the labels enough to make them readable. Frequently I'll have to fight with the map, zoom in and out and scroll around to get it to show me the name of a street at all, but when I finally do coax it into revealing a tiny name far downroad, the font is often too small to read. If I reflexively expand the map to get a closer look, everything expands except the label I'm trying to read.

And there's no way to expand it. I do understand that they don't want it to keep expanding beyond a certain point, especially as they add more details as they zoom. But they could let it expand within some constraints, such as the name of a street within the stripe of the street, and cap the size at 3x the normal size or some such thing.

If the algorithm for letting the labels grow a bit is just too hard for them, then just give me a little slider on the side to add a fixed, default label magnification factor. I could expand it a bit to make the labels easier to read in general, expand it more (but just temporarily) to get a better look at something, or shrink it a bit in cases where the labels were harder to read due to overcrowding.

As it is, they've removed too many useful labels without expanding the ones remaining to make them easier to read and prevented me from expanding them manually. Bother.

[majewsky]

Try to tap-and-hold on the street. It'll put a pin in there and tell you the address, which contains the road's name.

[stinos]

So I am not crazy after all!

He, came here to post the same thing. Since the last 2 or 3 years I had the impression GM went worse (for what I do with it, not even mobile) after every update made to it, and sometimes also slower and more CPU hungry. To the point I stopped using it and went looking for alternatives.

[wtbob]

Am I the only one who likes to know the road before my turn? That way I know when I need to change lanes/pay closer attention/whatever. New mapping apps really don't seem to want to share that information with me.

[Numberwang]

Finally I have an explanation to why GMaps have been annoying me so much.

Especially driving country roads and having to zoom in to kite level in order to see the medium sized villages is ridiculous.

Anyone know if Bing Maps is better?

[idop]

I've been trying to form a habit of using OpenStreetMap recently (though not because of the article's subject), you could give it a try.

[lucb1e]

I use:

- OpenStreetMap / OsmAnd for general use (about 75% of the time);

- Google Maps for traffic info, street view and businesses (about 20% of the time); and

- Bing Maps for areal imagery (about 5-10% of the time).

Google Maps is always extremely slow, but their business listings are very comprehensive due to their extensive marketing, and traffic info and street view are also expensive things open source cannot really rival.

Bing Maps runs at the speed of light when zooming and panning around the map. So much better than Google Maps, but the map's quality is not great so I just use it for areal imagery (another thing OSM does not have).

OpenStreetMap is as fast as Bing Maps and its map quality is better than both google and microsoft if you disregard business listings (at least in western Europe and the middle of nowhere[1]).

[1] https://twitter.com/lucb1e/status/522491538912604160

[idop]

Yep, I find this extra annoying when I'm on the roads and have a bad internet connection, or no connection at all (common when I'm traveling in the less-populated regions of the US). I have to zoom in several levels to see the road, but often I can't due to the connection. This is really frustrating.