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by TulliusCicero 2715 days ago
Living in Germany, I've found that OSM embeds in websites are more common for me now while browsing, and to be blunt: they're ugly.

The maps themselves are just difficult to visually parse, and unpleasant to look at compared to Google Maps and Apple Maps (which look comparably attractive at a glance). I dunno if that's solvable using a third party OSM service provider or not, but to me it seems like a good enough reason to switch.
3 comments
VvR-Ox 2715 days ago
Exactly. Reaching a critical mass of users is also about UI/UX and it's a bummer they seem to ignore that.
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detaro 2714 days ago
> I dunno if that's solvable using a third party OSM service provider or not,

Approximately everyone is using a third-party OSM service, since the OSM project does not provide map tiles for general use.

I also strongly disagree on your other criticism of the most common style, but that's a matter of taste. To me, they look more like a proper city map is supposed to look, and provide more detail that's useful for me to orient myself. If I were typically doing long car drives, I might prefer Google, but I don't.

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lucb1e 2714 days ago
As someone used to osm, you can show me my home town on Google maps and I won't recognize it anymore. There is so little detail on the map, it might as well be blank. Osm is fine, it's you who has only trained yourself in using Google maps.
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TulliusCicero 2714 days ago
No, OSM simply has bad UX.

Your anecdote is completely irrelevant, I'm not sure why you bothered to bring it up, since you're talking about data, while I'm talking about design.

If it was just me being too used to Google Maps, why don't I feel the same way about Apple Maps?

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lucb1e 2714 days ago
> No, OSM simply has bad UX.

It's not very convincing if I just argued the opposite and you don't bother giving a single counter argument. What's more is that it makes me feel there is no point talking about it if logical arguments don't convince you for no apparent reason.

> Your anecdote is completely irrelevant, I'm not sure why you bothered to bring it up, since you're talking about data, while I'm talking about design.

I am talking about design. If you zoom in on Google maps, the data is mostly there (osm also has more data, sure, but that's not universally true on the planet (though on average, per square kilometer, osm easily beats Google, but that's a blog post I'm saving for another day)). Google just hides all the data except a few random roads and random shops or something. You literally have to zoom in until your screen covers the area of two buildings before it shows you what's in the building. Somehow I'm supposed to have an overview of a city from the sparsely populated view. OSM (though you can have any style you like, I'm going for what I see most frequently) just dumps all the data it had on your screen at almost any zoom level (below province sized zoom) and you can see details like building outlines and shop icons from quite far up.

> If it was just me being too used to Google Maps, why don't I feel the same way about Apple Maps?

Maybe Apple maps is very similar to Google maps? If that holds, I should not be able to use apple maps (just like I can't use Google maps very well), but last time I tried to open it in a browser it told me to buy an apple device first so I can't compare. I don't know the answer to your question.

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