Six Years Perfecting Maps on WatchOS

SpyCoder77

As a pedometer++ user, it is amazing the attention to detail David has maintained over the years. The evolution is crazy.

thrownawaysz

The fact that there is no 1st party Apple made hiking and topography map on the Apple Watch is such a failure, not even on the most expensive “made for explorers” Watch Ultra. And things like gpx import is just a mere dream It’s a lifestyle device after all but still

apt-apt-apt-apt

For others curious like I was, it seems he hired a cartographer to render essentially a set of huge, nice-looking, custom map images with details like hiking trails that Apple Maps doesn't have. So unlike Apple Maps, which is dynamically rendered, it basically shows image tiles. It allows for a nicer-looking, more detailed map, but affects things like needing separate downloads for different zoom levels, rotation, updatability.

arjie

Apple Maps on WatchOS is pretty good but the usual routine is that I get on my bike with a route set and 3 minutes in the “are you working out?” screen takes over and I can’t see the maps without stopping to turn it off. Surely that screen should turn into a notification or silently record after some time without taking over the screen. I’m surprised to hear people at Apple work on this because surely they must encounter this issue. If this guys maps can somehow take the screen and hold it, I think he’s got a killer feature for me. Though I glanced at the App Store page and it wasn’t clear to me which features are subscription gated and which ones aren’t and I despise apps that won’t tell me till I’ve set everything up (it just feels so frustrating that it wasn’t clear ahead of time) so I’ll probably just endure and try to remember to start a workout manually so it won’t take over.

som

Great evolution story. Also love seeing what can be achieved by stepping outside design lines, re. centred, symmetrical UIs. Makes me want an apple watch ;) As an aside there's a screenshot in the article showing the Hidden Valley at Glen Coe, which happens to be one of my favourite short walks in Scotland. A less happy aside of that aside is the house at the base of the valley. I used to look at it dreamily as we drove past, always closed up, nestled by itself in a remote nook between the mountains. What an extraordinary place it would be to live. The park for the hike was only a couple of hundred metres up the road. A few years later I recognised the house in a Louis Theroux doco, when he travelled there with its owner - TV personality Jimmy Saville. Wow. And then a few years later again, after I'd returned to Australia, it came out, posthumous, that Saville was one of the UK's most prolific child and sexual predators. Horrific stuff. The name and outline of the cottage structure can actually be seen at the top of the map in the screenshot.

kweiza

Static tiles on a watch is the right call. Tried dynamic rendering on a constrained device once and pan/zoom got eaten by GC pauses every frame.

maz1b

Really enjoyed reading this. A lot. Reminds me when I was a teenager reading technical blogs in the earlier days of the internet. BTW, that last line about hiring/commissioning a cartographer, very rad and cool :~)

kobieps

I spend a lot of time in wilderness areas that I don't know, and I simply pull my phone out of my pocket to see where I am. My watch measures my heart rate and that's it. While I have no doubt that pedometer++ is great and the work that went into it is impressive, I can't really see myself switching away from a big screen workflow to see exactly where I am. And I don't need to check where I am every 5 minutes. Typically only every 30 minutes or longer. Dunno, maybe I'm missing something :shrug:

Razengan

While traveling in another country, I once forgot my iPhone passcode (don't ask, I'm autistic like that) After a few retries it put me on a 2 hour timeout. I had to get back to my room. I knew the way back on foot well enough, about 30 minutes away, but I wanted to take a look at the map anyway. I thought I'd try it on my Apple Watch Ultra 3. It was a few months ago so it was the latest OS. There were a few bugs in trying to do that simple task, like when typing out the name of a location the keyboard kept disappearing as if the UI was crashing or something. I sighed, muttered a few curses at the state of things and the people in charge who let it get this way, and lowered my wrist and just enjoyed the stroll. Like so many things in Apple software since the past 5 or so years, so much shit just doesn't work when you REALLY need it. F'n hell

mrcwinn

Awesome work, truly. (But I'll stick with my Garmin.)

bcraven

I appreciate this comes from an outside perspective as I've not heard of this before, but "Pedometer++ 8" sounds like "Dissertation_final_final_v8.docx" to me.