The Apple management cull as a result of the iOS Maps debacle continues…
Richard Williamson was manager of troubled maps division that has been dogged by glitches since dropping Google Share Email Rory Carroll in Los Angeles guardian.co.uk , Tuesday 27 November 2012 16.44 EST The mapping bungle also led to the ousting of mobile-software chief Scott Forstall in October. Photograph: Joseph […]
Apples Newton MessagePad PDA at Twenty | Techland | TIME.com.
Before the iPhone, before the iPad, Apple had a first foray into the mobile device market, and it didn’t go all that well…
Great article by Harry McCracken reviewing the original Apple Newton Message Pad. Whilst the product may be considered a failure, the technology and trends it started can be tracked directly to devices and software we use today.
I guess I was an early adopter of satellite navigation. Over ten years ago I had a navigation package from TomTom (or Palmtop as they were then called) installed on my Psion 5mx and through a complicated series of cables hooked it up to a Garmin eTrex and powered the whole thing in the car. It wasn’t bad, but it was a bit clunky, had no voice instructions, took an age to recalculate if you went off route, and had a number of mapping errors – Micheldever Station was marked on a railway bridge half a mile from the station for example.
From there I progressed onto stand alone units, sticking with Garmin as my handheld GPS units were Garmin’s and could share desktop software and maps. Currently I’m running a Garmin Nuvi with full maps of both Europe and North America and an FM traffic receiver, and that has served us fine.
Last week it turned out that both Beth and myself needed the satnav as both of us were going to be going to unfamiliar places. Obviously we didn’t need a second satnav, but since my iPhone has a nice little GPS on it I thought I’d take a look at the options. Conveniently PCPro have just done a group test of satnav applications, and TomTom came out top of the pile. Since one of my biggest bugbears with the Garmin Nuvi is the fact that the FM traffic often reports traffic jams when it’s too late to avoid them and I’d heard good things about the TomTom Live Traffic service I thought I’d go for the TomTom application despite it being one of the premium priced satnav products in the app store.
First off, it is a nice little app, slightly confusing to navigate around until you get used to it, but fine on the road. The Live Traffic service is impressive, and indicated traffic pretty consistently, and the routing based on actual road speeds certainly allowed it to pick routes which matched much more closely with short cuts I knew about rather than the more obvious routes the Garmin would take.
However there is a really big problem, even ten years later, there are still problems with the TomTom maps. Whilst Micheldever Station is now in the right place, other things aren’t. For example a local petrol station whilst close to the right spot is the wrong side of a road junction, speed limits are wrong, and whereas my Garmin will guide me right to my front door, even saying on which side of the street it is the TomTom app can only manage to get me to the street.
There are more serious problems too. We live adjacent to a military base, and whilst there are roads that go across, they are closed with security guards on the gates – the TomTom map doesn’t reflect this. The map is also just plain wrong in places, a major example being around the Atrium in Camberley.
Below are three screenshots from my iPhone. The left hand one is from the Maps application showing an up to date satellite picture of Southern Road down the side of the Atrium. The second shot is from TomTom, the only app of the three that costs any money. The third is from Waze, the community navigation app that is a free download.
Looking at it you’ll see that the TomTom version is very inaccurate. It incorrectly shows Southern Road running all the way to Southwell Park Road, and running all the way to the A30 at the other end – it doesn’t. Instead it is blocked at both ends with an access road a short way down. There is also an entire roundabout missing which in the TomTom version is replaced by a pair of junctions. Whilst the Atrium is pretty new, it’s been built for a number of years, and the road layout TomTom has doesn’t bear much relation to what is there now, nor to what was removed when the Atrium was built. The third screen shot shows the layout according to Waze which is correct, and the layout is also correct on my Garmin Nuvi.
It is fair to say I’m not impressed. TomTom, much like Waze has the ability to report map errors, but with Waze I’m not paying a premium price. Garmin have up to date maps, is it too much to expect that TomTom could do the same? Suffice to say my experience with TomTom is not going to have me switching. Whilst I am impressed with the Live Traffic it is pretty fundamental to have accurate maps, having found a number of errors locally where I know the area, how can I have the confidence travelling in a strange area that the TomTom is correct?
After initially not having the best camera, Apple seem to have realised that people like to take pictures on their phones and with the latest versions introduced a really nice little camera with great optics. Certainly in a lot of situations I don’t bother with a ‘real’ camera and just use the phone. With the iPhone 4S the phone also has great video capabilities, taking really nice 1080p footage, and even allowing it to be edited on the phone with iMovie.
However there is one problem, some people won’t really notice it, but it is pretty apparent with certain sequences especially on a desktop. Take a look at this video of some steam trains:
The problem is apparent as the train comes slowly into the station, every so often there is a slight stall or jitter, more interestingly the problem doesn’t seem to appear watching the original footage on the phone. So what is going on?
The answer is actually pretty simple. We’re all used to being able to hold the iPhone any which way we like to take pictures. With the arrival of the volume button shutter functionality it encourages us to hold the phone with the volume buttons on the top, but in terms of the camera itself, this is actually holding the camera upside down.
With a photo this doesn’t much matter, but with a video it does.
If you watch the raw footage using certain low level video players like VLC you’ll find that the video is actually upside down. The iPhone makes use of a Quicktime feature to tell the video to play in a different orientation, and whilst the iPhone playback appears to have been optimised, desktop playback introduces this annoying jitter.
The answer then is pretty simple, until the same optimisation gets into desktop versions of Quicktime, you need to remember to hold the iPhone with the camera the right way up – the volume buttons should be at the bottom, and the home button on the right. The next video was taken with the same iPhone as the trains above, but, aside from my dodgy camerawork, the jitter is not apparent.
At one of my previous employers, in our part of IT you were always well advised to avoid being on out of hours support over the last weekend in March and especially over the last weekend in October, the reason being that these are the clock change weekends, and more often than not one system or other would not cope with the changeover particularly well. Indeed there was one system that we were usually advised to shut down overnight on the Saturday because it really didn’t cope very well with having 1am-2am twice.
Clock change problems are not a new issue, if the system hasn’t been properly coded and tested it’s quite easy to program the system against the local time and run into quite serious issues when the clocks change. The generally accepted technique is to code everything to work from UTC, which doesn’t change, and then present times in local time.
As a result, what happened today with iPhone’s all across the UK came as rather a surprise – especially as it’s not been a problem before.
I have a couple of recurring alarms. One is set for weekdays, but then I have one timed at 8:15am for church on a Sunday.
This morning it didn’t go off. The time on the phone was correct, as was the time in the clock application, but it just didn’t ring. An hour later whilst I was in the bathroom, at 9:15am it did finally go off.
Those people used to time change problems would probably be quite surprised by that – if the alarm hadn’t taken account of the change you’d expect it to go off an hour early rather than an hour late, but from testing recurring alarms are consistently going off an hour late.
What is even more interesting is how I’ve got the alarms to ring at the right time. I tried restarting the phone and changing the timezone to somewhere else and back, and also trying to change the time, none of them appear to work. The one thing that has is something that will work for people in the UK, and that is changing the timezone to Iceland.
The significant point about Iceland is that they don’t observe daylight savings – they are permanently on UTC/GMT, so in the winter their time is the same as the UK, and in the summer an hour different. Switching to that timezone and immediately all the recurring alarms start working at the correct time.
What is perhaps most surprising about the problem is that Apple have known about it for a while, as there were similar problems in Australia and New Zealand when their clocks changed. Apple however haven’t fixed it, and unless something appears in the next week are sailing headlong into a massive problem when the US and Canada change their clocks next week. Best get ready for the uproar as thousands of people who rely on their iPhones to wake them up are all an hour late…
Update Day two after the clock change, and one iPhone worked fine, the other still went off an hour late! The difference between the two is the one that worked had alarms that were recreated in the London timezone after the clocks had changed. Whilst they still rang an hour late whilst in the London zone, they work fine in Iceland. On the other the only change we made was to switch the timezone, so the alarms were created in BST.
Further comment online indicates that the problem doesn’t occur if the alarm is set to repeat every day, only if they repeat on some days in the week.
Alarms have been recreated on the second iPhone, so we’ll see what happens on day three.