<story><title>What Happened to Google Maps?</title><url>http://www.justinobeirne.com/essay/what-happened-to-google-maps</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>x0054</author><text>So I am not crazy after all! The other day I was driving in Palm Springs, and I was using Google Maps. I literally had to zoom in until the road I was on almost completely field the screen before it would show me the name of the road or the roads around it. They did something to their display algorithm where you now have to zoom almost entirely into an area to see anything about the area, very inconvenient.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>SiVal</author><text>It drives me crazy that I can&amp;#x27;t find half of the labels I&amp;#x27;m looking for, and when I do, I can&amp;#x27;t increase the size of the labels enough to make them readable. Frequently I&amp;#x27;ll have to fight with the map, zoom in and out and scroll around to get it to show me the name of a street at all, but when I finally do coax it into revealing a tiny name far downroad, the font is often too small to read. If I reflexively expand the map to get a closer look, everything expands except the label I&amp;#x27;m trying to read.&lt;p&gt;And there&amp;#x27;s no way to expand it. I do understand that they don&amp;#x27;t want it to keep expanding beyond a certain point, especially as they add more details as they zoom. But they could let it expand within some constraints, such as the name of a street within the stripe of the street, and cap the size at 3x the normal size or some such thing.&lt;p&gt;If the algorithm for letting the labels grow a bit is just too hard for them, then just give me a little slider on the side to add a fixed, default label magnification factor. I could expand it a bit to make the labels easier to read in general, expand it more (but just temporarily) to get a better look at something, or shrink it a bit in cases where the labels were harder to read due to overcrowding.&lt;p&gt;As it is, they&amp;#x27;ve removed too many useful labels without expanding the ones remaining to make them easier to read and prevented me from expanding them manually. Bother.</text></comment>
<story><title>What Happened to Google Maps?</title><url>http://www.justinobeirne.com/essay/what-happened-to-google-maps</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>x0054</author><text>So I am not crazy after all! The other day I was driving in Palm Springs, and I was using Google Maps. I literally had to zoom in until the road I was on almost completely field the screen before it would show me the name of the road or the roads around it. They did something to their display algorithm where you now have to zoom almost entirely into an area to see anything about the area, very inconvenient.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>wtbob</author><text>Am I the only one who likes to know the road &lt;i&gt;before&lt;/i&gt; my turn?  That way I know when I need to change lanes&amp;#x2F;pay closer attention&amp;#x2F;whatever. New mapping apps really don&amp;#x27;t seem to want to share that information with me.</text></comment>