iOS 6 maps are better for applications

Posted on by Hal Mueller

I’m very happy to see the new look brought to iOS maps via Apple’s switch to an in-house solution. Much noise has been made about the errors and the lost detail. I think the lost detail is an improvement.

The other night, a friend and I did a side-by-side comparison of my app HistoryPointer on iOS 6 and iOS 5 (bonus points if you can figure out where we were sitting). HistoryPointer displays a bunch of points of interest on a map (further details aren’t especially relevant). On the top is the HistoryPointer running on iOS 6 (with maps from Apple); on the bottom it’s running under iOS 5 (with maps from Google).

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To my eye, the iOS 6 version is much easier to read when you’re looking for the overlaid points of interest.There are fewer labels on the Apple map than on the Google map. The color scheme is less intrusive. There are some problems with label placement on the Apple map: State Route 99, for example, near the right-hand edge, is missing its street name (Aurora Avenue) on the Apple version even though other less important streets are labeled.

I see lots of potential in this move. There’s a control panel to adjust label size on map views. There’s obviously some dynamic label generation and pruning going on. I like the prospect of enhancements to MapKit to allow programmatic control of many of these parameters. Imagine what you could do with API to do these things:

  • adjust the size of (or omit!) certain kinds of labels.
  • control the orientation of the map to maximize the use of the screen space. North doesn’t always have to be up.
  • apply a custom color scheme, so that your overlaid data is easier to read.
  • omit certain kinds of features. Not everyone wants driving directions. There are many applications where the streets, highways, and manmade features are simply clutter.

Think about the possibilities. How would you like your app’s MKMapView to be different? File those radars! I have several of my own in mind.

Drobo FS and Lion: update

Posted on by Hal Mueller

I just had a phone call from a Drobo senior engineer. He was very frank and direct. It was the sort of conversation two developers have when nobody from management is in the room.

Without going into detail, I have to say that I was impressed. They have of course been testing this setup thoroughly, since the very first Lion developer previews. The Drobo engineer outlined for me the testing procedures they’re using right now, to try to replicate the failures some of us are seeing. They haven’t been able to replicate it. If you can’t make something bleed, it’s hard to kill it.

If you’ve ever shipped software, you’ve faced this situation. A customer experiences some bug, maybe even an intermittent one, that you can’t reproduce yourself. It is maddeningly frustrating for both the developer and the customer.

We were on the phone for 45 minutes. He had very specific logfiles that he wanted from my system. He laid out for me the plan they have for killing this problem, and the multiple approaches seem very sound to me.

They do indeed need the performance tests that first-level support has been asking us to run.

Based on what I learned today I’m going to hang in there for a while longer.

I have created a new Time Machine share on the FS, and I’m running a backup to it now from one of my Lion machines. It’s working fine. I’m going to give it a couple more hours, then kill it, and apply the procedure that Sébastien used. The only change I’ll make is to mount the shares manually using SMB, instead of having to play Beat The Clock.

One other update is that my Snow Leopard machine, which was (immediately after the new firmware) seeing absurdly low throughput, is now functioning fine. I didn’t touch anything. I just let it work.