[hellerbarde]

Does that strike anyone else as a weird thing to do? They write

"Instead we’ve created a new way for you to access maps offline by simply entering “OK Maps” into the search box when viewing the area you want for later."

err.. Simply?

[przemoc]

Weird is an euphemism here. It's totally incomprehensible change.

My wild guess it's targeting voice commanding, which I practically never use as voice recognition is still not reliable enough (and I'm not always comfortable with shouting at my phone in public).

[Lewisham]

The "ok" prefix is the one that Glass uses. I wonder if there's some implied integration there. That the feature is hidden from the UI makes me think this was supposed to not be in use until Glass is out, until someone internally kicked off and said "WHAT DO YOU MEAN OFFLINE MAPS WON'T BE AVAILABLE UNTIL GLASS IS OUT?!"

[wjoe]

I assume/hope that they're going to integrate it properly in a future update. They mention a few other features that aren't in this version that they're planning to put back in future updates, so hopefully this is the same.

If not, then this is a pretty terrible unintuitive way to access a very useful feature. I'm not sure how anyone would even know it exists if they hadn't read about it in one of these posts.

[brandonb927]

I can imagine its related to the whole Glass interaction like 'OK Glass, <take x action>'