Look what Nik Cubrilovic found when he looked hard at the icon for the new IoS map app.
LATER: extraordinary letter of apology from Tim Cook”
While we’re improving Maps, you can try alternatives by downloading map apps from the App Store like Bing, MapQuest and Waze, or use Google or Nokia maps by going to their websites and creating an icon on your home screen to their web app.
There’s a lovely, reflective review by Michael Dirda of Richard Hofstadter’s Anti-Intellectualism in American Life on the Barnes & Noble Review site.
I was struck by this quotation from Hofstadter about the philistinism of 19th-century US business, and thinking that nothing much has changed in the last hundred years.
The more thoroughly business dominated American society, the less it felt the need to justify its existence by reference to values outside its own domain. In earlier days it had looked for sanction in the claim that the vigorous pursuit of trade served God, and later that it served character and culture. Although this argument did not disappear, it grew less conspicuous in the business rationale. As business became the dominant motif in American life and as a vast material empire rose in the New World, business increasingly looked for legitimation in a purely material and internal criterion — the wealth it produced. American business, once defended on the ground that it produced a high standard of culture, was now defended mainly on the ground that it produced a high standard of living.
Amazing story in The Economist.
A FEW years ago Francis Schwarze noticed something unusual. Dr Schwarze, who works at the Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science and Technology, in St Gallen, knew that sound travels faster through healthy wood, which is stiff and dense, than it does through the soft stuff left by a fungal attack. But some fungi, he found, do not slow sound. Moreover, the acoustic properties of wood so affected seem to be just what violin-makers desire. So Dr Schwarze had some violins made from the infected wood and discovered that they sounded like a Stradivarius.
But the really lovely bit is that at the end of the piece the magazine provides two audio recordings which enable one to compare a violin made from untreated wood with one that’s made from fungal-infected timber.
From today’s Daily Telegraph.
News Corporation plans to reverse an earlier decision to stop articles from its quality papers, such as The Times and The Sunday Times, from featuring in Google’s listings. The effort to stop users from accessing content for free will be watered down, with Google featuring stories in search rankings from next month.
The move comes amid fears that the newspapers’ exclusion is limiting their influence and driving down advertising revenues. Sources claim the change was a “marketing exercise”.
Ah, yes: our old friend, the “marketing exercise”.
“We think it would have been better if they had kept ours. But what do I know? What were we going to do, force them not to change their mind? It’s their call.”
Eric Schmidt, Google’s Chairman, commenting on Apple’s decision to drop Google Maps from the iPhone 5.
Thanks to Sean French for the link.
Trudy Miller, an Apple spokeswoman, released this statement yesterday: “Customers around the world are upgrading to iOS 6 with over 200 new features including Apple Maps, our first map service. We are excited to offer this service with innovative new features like Flyover…”.
Quite so. Thanks to Technology Review for the pic.
Lots of people are outraged by the glaring defects in Apple’s maps — now a mandatory part of IoS6. (Jean-Jouis Gassee takes a more nuanced view.) But David Talbot’s Technology Review piece rightly focusses on Apple’s Kremlin-like PR response to the fiasco.
This disaster (see “Smartphone Makers Can’t Afford to Mess Up Mapping”) is still unfolding. It’s worse than just being a bad service. Given the ubiquity of these devices, it’s not hard to imagine people getting sent down Class 4 unmaintained roads in rural areas and getting stuck in ditches. Others may be getting directed the wrong-way on one-way streets and posing a danger of head-on collisions. It’s only a matter of time before anecdotes like these will start emerging.
Apple is in full spin mode. Trudy Miller, an Apple spokeswoman, released this statement yesterday: “Customers around the world are upgrading to iOS 6 with over 200 new features including Apple Maps, our first map service. We are excited to offer this service with innovative new features like Flyover, turn by turn navigation, and Siri integration. We launched this new map service knowing it is a major initiative and that we are just getting started with it. Maps is a cloud-based solution and the more people use it, the better it will get. We appreciate all of the customer feedback and are working hard to make the customer experience even better.”
Personally I’m going to avoid updating to IoS6 for the time being. But what I’d really like to know is how the screw-up was allowed to happen in a company that’s usually good at getting working stuff out on time. And isn’t it strange how even a smart company doesn’t get it that old-style PR responses don’t wash any more. The right thing to have done would have been to say: “we f****d up and here’s a voucher to compensate you for any inconvenience that the maps might have caused”.
This is like Antennagate all over again.
MORE: Business Insider thinks that part of the problem may be due to the fact that Apple hasn’t thrown enough resources at the mapping application:
In June, we talked to a pair of Googlers involved in its mapping product, and they said that Google has 1,100 full time employees and 6,000 contractors working on its mapping products. Those 7,000 people do all sorts of granular work.
What do these 7,000 people do? Our source says they are “street view drivers, people flying planes, people drawing maps, people correcting listings, and people building new products.”
Apple is reportedly hiring developers to improve its Maps product.
Seems like it’s going to take a lot more than that.
