TomTom, the Dutch navigation systems company that powers Apple Maps, announced today that it has renewed its contract with Apple to provide digital mapping data for iOS.
Mike Judge’s great HBO comedy Silicon Valley has featured some fantastic references to Apple in the past — including a tongue-in-cheek dismissal of Steve Jobs as someone who “didn’t even code” and two not-so-obvious Apple logos that pop up during the show’s opening.
The most recent episode, entitled “Homicide,” contained one more namecheck of everyone’s favorite Cupertino company, but it’s unlikely to be a reference that got Tim Cook guffawing in front of his TV at home — since it skewered one of the most notorious Apple products of all time.
Let’s just leave aside the obvious Apple Maps jokes and focus on how cool this Etsy user’s Westeros map is.
It’s the continent where the war, sex and epic political conniving takes place in George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire, made to look like a modern map you might find on your iPhone or Mac.
How cool is that?
Getting direction from a computer sucks, but that could soon change based on a new patent filed by Apple for “Humanized Navigation Instructions for Mapping Applications.
Rather than receiving instructions from an emotion-less robot, Apple’s new patent would make Siri’s turn-by-turn directions sound more like they’re coming from your buddy in the passenger seat by mixing in references to restaurants and landmarks.
Here’s some examples you might here, instead of just being told “in 500 feet, turn right”:
You’re driving home late one night with your friend following. You lose him at a red light and, realizing he doesn’t have your address, need to tell him where to go.
You ask Siri to share your route with your friend, and voila, he’s able to follow your location as you drive with the Maps app.
Such is the kind of scenario that could arise in the future, thanks to a new Apple patent.
For a long time, Apple Maps was a laughing stock. Then it started getting better. Apple ironed out the glitches, began updating Apple Maps every day, and introduced Flyover, which gave you a 3-D view of major cities as they would look from the sky.
Now it’s taken that technology one step further in an effort to win the mapping war versus Google: Apple Maps is going real-time.
Thanks to a new update, London’s Big Ben clock tower will now show the real time, while the iconic London Eye will rotate. Those are the only real-time updates we’ve spotted so far, but Apple is reportedly looking to add more moving elements to cities over the following year.
After hints that a broader international rollout was imminent, Apple Maps Connect has officially come to Germany, France and Canada.
The mysterious Apple minivans roaming the roads in California, Florida and elsewhere are generally assumed to be self-driving cars, but they are not. They are almost undoubtedly collecting data for maps.
They are “almost certainly a mapping vehicle,” said Paul Godsmark, chief technology officer with the Canadian Automated Vehicles Centre of Excellence, who examined photos of the mystery vehicles at Cult of Mac’s request.
You may have never heard of the Aral Sea, even though it was the fourth largest lake in the world as recently as the 1960’s.
The once-gigantic body of water which rests on the border of Uzbekistan has shrunk to less than 10% of its former size over the last half century. It’s been dubbed one of the worst environmental disasters ever, but looking at Apple Maps you’d never even know the Russians drained the mighty lake dry, destroyed its robust fishing industry, and left behind a wasteland of salt, pollution, and toxic dust storms.
Apple Maps has been out for over two years, but it’s just finally completing its original mission to completely replace Google Maps in all of Apple’s products.
Starting today, iCloud.com users will see an online version of Apple Maps when using Find My iPhone instead of Google Maps.
We get slammed 24/7 with new Apple rumors. Some are accurate, most are not. To give you a clue about what’s really coming out of Cupertino in the future, we’re busting out our rumor debunker each week to blow up the nonsense.
The Apple rumor mill is going into hibernation mode over the winter, but that’s not stopping a few juicy bits from leaking out. This week we’ve got rumors of Apple Maps coming to the web, the giant iPad facing production problems, and the first batch of Apple Watch orders.
Step up to our crystal ball and see which rumors are likely to come true in 2015.
Whether you’re a Mac novice or a seasoned veteran, there are a ton of tips and ticks out there for mastering OS X Yosemite. In Part 2 of our Yosemite tip series, we gather more of the very best.
If you’ve got a business that Apple Maps just keeps on getting wrong, great news. Apple has just launched a new portal for U.S. businesses to add or edit their listings within Apple Maps.
Apple is attempting to push its Apple Maps software to the next level, courtesy of indoor mapping capabilities, according to a new patent application uncovered by Cult of Mac today.
Filed in April this year, the application describes a method of seamlessly transitioning from a map displaying exterior elements like roads and buildings to one that shows indoor elements, like stores and restaurants.
This technology is designed to work with iBeacons, Apple’s Bluetooth Low Energy emitters designed to make iDevices location aware indoors.
When Apple Maps disastrously launched in 2012 even the most faithful of Apple fanboys thought it’d never be competitive against the obviously superior Google Maps. But just two years after it announced its own mapping platform, Apple is now dominating Google in mapping traffic on 4G, at least on one U.K. carrier.
Apple Maps crashed and burned coming off the runway in iOS 6, but new additions in iOS 8 beta 3 show Apple’s had a change of heart, and is even making it easier for Apple Maps users to jump to Google Maps and other services thanks to some new UI tweaks.
Starting in iOS 8, users will be able to run a search for locations in Apple Maps and use either Apple’s own driving and walking directions, or switch directly to another app already installed on your device via a simplified menu.
Two years after Apple replaced Google with its own Maps app in iOS 6, the last remnant of Google Maps in Apple’s ecosystem is getting the boot. Apple has begun switching to its own mapping service for the Find My iPhone web app on iCloud.com.
The change isn’t visible for everyone yet, but it can be seen from the beta version of iCloud.com where Apple tests upcoming features.
USA! USA! On this festive 4th-of-July CultCast: Apple prepares to kill-off Aperture and iPhoto; Siri might soon understand us all better; Apple maps stops getting you lost; and did you know Steve Jobs always ate lunch alone like a sad Keanu? We’ll tell you the story. Plus, we reveal our favorite 4th activities, and a weird breakthrough app has us texting Hodor to all our friends! Gods be good.
Grab your sparklers and catch up on this week’s best Apple stories! Stream or download new and past episodes of The CultCast now on your Mac or iDevice by subscribing on iTunes, or hit play below and let the festivities begin.
Our thanks to TextExpander for supporting this episode! TextExpander for Mac saves you time and effort by expanding short abbreviations into frequently-used text, pictures, code blocks, and more, and it’s an application we use every single day. Try it out for free at Smilesoftware.com/cultcast.
Since it was first released as part of iOS 6, Apple Maps has gotten a partially deserved bad rap. Although nowhere near as bad as it was at release, Apple Maps has a reputation for being unreliable compared to options like Google Maps.
One thing that was particularly frustrating about Apple Maps at release was the fact that while the app invited users to report incorrect locations and results, nothing ever seemed to happen with those reports. So if Apple gave you incorrect directions, it might take months for the error to be fixed.
But a thread on Reddit offers what appears to be conclusive proof that Apple has gotten its act together about Maps. According to the thread, Apple is now pushing through error corrections in Apple Maps on a daily basis.
Apple didn’t tell anyone during WWDC, but it wants iOS 8 to be the ultimate city tour guide.
Cupertino is adding a new Flyover City Tours feature to its Maps app. And even though the code has been hidden, developer Pierre Blazquez managed to unearth it from the latest iOS 8 beta release to give us a preview of the new feature that’s still in development.
Flyover tours are currently only available for Rome, Stockholm, Barcelona, New York, Paris and a few other cities, but in a video posted by Mac4Ever, we’ve been given our first glimpse of the tours in action.
Apple Maps may not shed any light on how Stonehenge was constructed (my personal favorite theory is that it was a particularly rubbish-sounding ancient team-building event), but it can now give you a beautiful 3D view of the ancient stone circle.
First unveiled in iOS 6, Apple Maps has been known to distort reality before, but can it conjure a mythical prehistoric beast from the waters of Loch Ness?
Cryptozoologists are saying yes. They are claiming that Apple Maps has finally located the elusive Loch Ness Monster!
In early 2012, Apple acquired Chomp, largely to fix the broken search, recommendation and discovery features of the iOS App Store.
Two years later, app discovery on the iOS App Store remains pretty much as broken as ever. Maybe that’s why Cathy Edwards, Chomp’s co-founder who went on, post-acquisition, to become Director of Evaluation and Quality on Apple Maps, is leaving Apple come April 11.
It was widely reported in January that Apple was in talks to buy Waze, an Israeli startup with a hugely popular maps app. Waze was rumored to be asking Apple for $750 million. The same outlet that broke the acquisition rumor quickly backpedaled and said no such deal was taking place. Google ended up buying Waze in June for $1 billion.
And so goes the buyout game in Silicon Valley, a power play where tech giants like Apple and Google court hot startups with the hopes of adding them to their war chests.
Apple had its biggest year ever for acquisitions in 2013, with a record 15 smaller companies joining the fold. A dozen of them have now been publicly disclosed.
For an entity as secretive as Apple, examining the companies it buys is one of the only ways to peek into its future plans. When AuthenTec, a company that specialized in fingerprint readers and identification software, was purchased in July 2012, speculation immediately followed. What did Apple want with fingerprint sensors? The answer ended up being obvious, and the technology debuted in Touch ID in September 2013.
Often the outcome of an Apple acquisition isn’t so immediately apparent.
Historically, Apple acquires far fewer companies than its competitors. But the line is starting to blur. Google publicly bought three times as many companies as Apple in 2012 and not even twice as many in 2013. Apple bought more companies than Microsoft in 2013.
So what does all of this say about Apple’s future?
It’s come a long way from its disastrous early days (although there is still the occasional tendency to direct someone the wrong way up an airport taxiway), but Apple Maps may finally be taking the lead over its competitors — if you’re inclined to believe Apple’s latest patent.
The patent — recently published by the US Patent and Trademark Office — was filed May 31 this year, and applies to an “Interactive Map” application, which would display multiple layers of information regarding local landmarks.