How do you find the cached maps? Do you just zoom out, scroll to the area and zoom back in?

Is there a limit to how much you can cache? Will the caches expire at some point?

BTW, you can also save a map by adjusting the displayed area, then searching for: ok maps

FWIW, 6.14.4 seems to be the last pre-design version. See https://support.google.com/gmm/answer/2650218?hl=en

I'm a bit nervous about searching for the apk - the first two copies I downloaded were different sizes.

Here's a copy of 6.14.4 http://forum.xda-developers.com/show...51&postcount=2 I haven't installed it, but I've found the exact same file (byte for byte comparison) in another location.

I have to confess that I actually liek the update. The only negative I can see is that it doesn't show the level of location precision any more (or at least I haven't found it). It's not a big deal, but sometimes it's good to know whether you have a 3m lock or a 30m lock.

In my airplane-mode testing, I found that a lot of maps were already cached. I was able to zoom out, scroll to France, and zoom in on Paris and London (which I'd cached explicitly).

The Maps app doesn't provide any information about cached maps -- no size, name, number or possible expiration dates.

Of all the undiscoverable features in the new Google Maps, the "ok maps" instruction for caching wins the prize. It's a bit ironic, too, given that the word "cache" comes from the French for "hidden".

Having watched various other Google apps evolve (including the previous Maps, which was lacking many features in its earliest iterations), I'm pretty confident the new Maps will improve rapidly. Still, pushing a major new release prematurely is a big mistake and it's gonna take a while for Google to recover goodwill this one has cost it.

Google Maps Update. I HATE IT!!
 

My lone issue with the iOS version is the map will not flip 180 degrees.

This matters because I bring an auxiliary cable for when my rental doesn't have Bluetooth, and the audio jack is on the bottom of the phone. So when I glance at it in the cup holder, at best the image has turned 90 degrees.

Is there a setting to allow the app to flip 180 degrees?

The Android version doesn't flip 180 degrees either. I'm not sure Android even supports that mode. You could consider one of these for use in rental cars.

Maps supports both 90 and 180 rotation on Android. In my car mount my power connector is on the left. In a rental it is on the right. The Map is the correct orientation in both scenarios.

+1 on loving the updates...However, Waze is by far the best app for navigating in traffic.

Waze is a great concept. It was what Dash Navigation tried to be years ago. However, I live in a community of +500,000 and the granularity of the traffic in Waze is very weak compared to Google.

+1

Haven't had the chance to figure out the new Google Maps. Landed in BCN last week, fired up Maps and found a disaster on my hands - no way I could figure out how to get NAV working. Managed to drive to the hotel and once there removed update which has been just fine driving around all of BCN and about 500 miles in Italy.

It may be a better product but having it sprung on you at the beginning of a trip without recourse is inexcusable. Google needs to rethink its approach to updates and how that impact customers.

Huh? How can Google update your phone without your permission? To my knowledge the only two ways to update Maps is: 1) you either downloaded the update through the Play Store yourself or 2) you checked the box in the Play Store settings that permitted automatic updates. I don't know of a scenario where Google can update Maps against your will.

I'm planning a trip to Hong Kong and am cranky about the base map accuracy. Victoria Peak is on a street downtown. Mt Davis is in the bay. In Macau, the first listing for Ruin's of St Paul's is about 800 meters off. And a bunch of roads from the mainland are shown in the water of Macau's inner harbor.

I suspect they've been importing cool new info and reviews from new sources, but I wish they'd checked their work more carefully .... I'm puzzled and amused that "Report a problem" is disabled for Hong Kong.

I don't think Google owns the Hong Kong maps. I think the maps in that area are licensed from AutoNavi and MapKing. You can look at the copyright notice in the lower right corner when you zoom into a place and get a pretty good handle on whether you are looking at 3rd party licensed data or Google's own data.

#1 problem with the new Maps IMO. What kind of idiot designs a maps program without a scale? Map making 101, no?

Hmmm. Thanks. I was only slightly aware of that.

Still inaccurate Points of Interest like "Ruins of St Paul's" with a pop up pointing to 38 google plus reviews make me suspect the item wasn't inserted by Map King.

It's totally unverifiable. But seems to me the maps were more accurate when I used them 15 months ago and earlier. Maybe I just never noticed.

They could have been more accurate 15 months ago. The same thing happened a few years ago in the US when Google converted from TeleAtlas (TomTom) to their own map. They essentially "backtracked" to a public domain source of map data then began their "ground truth" campaign. They owned the content and map from that point, which led to their MapMaker program to improve it. Since MapMaker is not available in Hong Kong yet it leads me to believe that Google has not taken ownership of the data in that area yet. As such, there is nothing for them to change or ask users for input on, as it isn't their data to edit. It could make sense that a POI would have a Google+ profile as the place certainly exists, reviews would be valid, etc., it could just be in the wrong place at this time due to the location data being from others. The Google+ POI profiles could be a "stepping stone" towards Ground Truth.

I think we shouldn't lose site of the fact that Google offers Maps for free. Sometimes, in my opinion, people comment about Maps as if they just paid Google $250 for a GPS.

That just sounds like 90/270 compatibility (i.e., turn 90-degrees to either the right or left). What it can't do IME is orient it self correctly if you spin your phone/tablet completely upside down, so that if your charger port is normally on the bottom of the phone, it's now on the top.

This is also frustrating for me, as that's the orientation I need to leave my phone in my cupholder and also have access to the charging port.

BTW, as frustrating as the new GMaps is on a mobile device, I somehow despise it EVEN MORE on a computer. I have no idea how to find the old menus, how to get the boxes in the top left out of the way so I can actually see that quarter of the map, and while I just figured out how to show traffic, I miss the ability to look at "usual" traffic for different times of day. :mad:

These updates are akin to the new Hangouts app losing the basic IM function of seeing whether or not your contacts are online. Luckily for that, I was able to just sideload Talk back in. ^

I think my complaints are more with apple than google. What I find most annoying is that contact addresses default to apple maps. Ditto for google search results, i.e. you look up a business in google app, tap on street address. Is there a way to switch the default map program?

As for google maps I like that I don't have to turn on Traffic every time I load the program (which is most often the reason I am using it). However it would be nice if I could adjust the default to a 30 miles radius (for traffic) instead of the closeup street view which is largely useless. Also I get annoyed when switching from the voice directions back to the traffic map. When I have voice directions I don't need to see the written version but I do like to monitor traffic on the route. Finally it is annoyingly easy to accidentally rotate off true north.

These are all minor quibbles, I still find it amazing that I can get free realtime traffic and mapping on my phone. How does Garmin stay in business?

You are correct. I've never tried that. But, I tried it on many apps and none of them do it. I am wondering if Android itself doesn't support "upside down" rotation?

Android does support 180 if an app does. I can watch movies upside down on my Nexus 10 :). Handy because with my cover, you have to set it one way to use it as a stand, but I find it more comfortable flipped the other way if I'm holding it in my hands.

Well the redesign with the loss of previous features, like My Maps, means you gain ... advertising!

http://arstechnica.com/business/2013...-to-maps-apps/

With the GPS problems in the new Nexus 7 and the decline in Google Maps, I wonder now about the usefulness of Android for GPS.

Then iOS version of Google Maps will have ads too but at least there are other options.

Does anyone else use the location history feature in Google Maps? That seems to have disappeared, too. According to Google you can go to the Google Settings app and turn the history back on, but no matter how many times I try, it shuts itself off again. I know some people really hated it, but I love the the ability to recreate what I did on particular days. :(

Whether a particular Android build supports 180 is largely device-dependent. Tablets usually support it, but most phones don't.

I found out the hard way last weekend that when you save maps for offline use, it does not save any of your "starred" places along with it, and for some reason does not update the road labels as well - lots of scrolling around to try to figure out what road we needed to look for, even for some interstates!

What's so hard about setting up a Google Plus account and just leaving it sit there? It's not painful at all. What is painful is adding a bunch of friends. I setup a G+ account back when it started, have only a very few friends in my circles, most of which work for Google, and that's it. I am not required to go to the G+ website and see what people are doing. And when a notification comes it from G+, which is rare, a quick delete stroke gets rid of that. And the new Gmail nicely places all those notifications in the new Social tab so it doesn't pollute my main email tab. So it really is painless and if it makes my overall Google experience better then I'm fine with that.

I am having a difficult time with the new Chrome interface to Google Maps, but that is just getting used to a new thing.

When I finally set up a Facebook account a few years ago, I spent several hours finding and turning off all sorts of sharing features that were turned on by default. Not fun as a FB newbie. This exercise needs to be repeated periodically as Facebook reorganizes existing features and introduces new ways to share your info.

I gave into Google+ for awhile -- it seemed innocent at first -- until it became apparent that Google+ was sharing at least some info about me, as well. Not wanting to go through the entire privacy-protecting exercise with Google+, too, I deleted my Google+ account and will continue to resist the constant prompting to sign up for it. One social media headache is enough, thank you!

Now w.r.t. Google Maps, I have a long road trip coming up, and based on this thread, I'm seriously thinking about dusting off the old Garmin and taking it along as a backup. At least the interface didn't suddenly change in the year since I last used it!

I don't use FB so no worries there.

But what could Google possibly share about you if you don't put any info in your G+ profile? I'm saying just setup an account to make things easier with Google. You don't have to put any details in there if you don't want to.

I don't use Social Media either and I am completely stumped how to setup G+ (which it feels like Google is pushing me to) without any info being passed over?

My buddy who works for Google does not use G+ either (not a big Social Media Person) and when I asked him, he had no idea how to keep G+ basically empty.

Any insight would be greatly appreciated,

Dan

Other than your Gmail email address, which is the main key to your overall Google experience, you can make up whatever you want for the rest of the G+ criteria. Fake birthday, fake country, etc. It doesn't matter. Your other email addresses and other personal information does not have to be passed over.

I gave up and reverted to the old Maps on my PC. The new version only loaded successfully about 70% of the time, no matter what browser I used. And my computer is certainly up to snuff for the technical requirements.

What kind of PC? I have a 4 year old Thinkpad running XP and the new maps loads fine on my PC. It is taking some getting used to though!

Are you using Chrome?

Possibly nothing. But based on my FB experience, I don't want to to have to figure out what info from my Google profile that Google+ does or does not share, how to disable it, and how to keep it unshared. In fact, there's nothing whatsoever I want from Google+.

My solution to this is to not sign up for Google+ at all and not have to worry about what it might be sharing. If/when Google+ has some compelling feature that's worth the trouble, I'll reconsider.

To keep this post OT, I'll add that if Google someday decides to integrate with Google Maps with Google+, that might just drive me to Bing. :shudder:

About a 1 year old Lenovo running Win7. 3.2GHz/4GB.

I've tried Chrome (my primary browser), IE, and Firefox to no avail. Most of the time I get the gray screen with "Google" and the three dots in the middle, the search box, and the black menu bar across the top, but it never gets past there to load an actual map.

I rather enjoy the old Maps anyway, so I'm clinging on to that for now.

Do you use Gmail, Maps, or any other Google product/service? I'm relatively sure that if they truly wanted to, they can and do still capture user information for folks not using G+.

I'm with you that I have no use for G+ and it seems like a bit of a hassle (especially with the big push to integrate everything into it), but I just registered the account anyway and put in nothing more than my name and city (and maybe birth year). That's all information that Google has about me anyway via Gmail and Android, so even if they did want to share it, it's not like they have anything extra just because of G+.

One thing really bothers me about how Google exposes Google+ information: they expose my name next to formerly-anonymous Google reviews for places in their maps. I've spent a little time trying to undo that to no avail. It seems the only way to get rid of them is to delete your Google+ account, and even then, Google only says it will try to eliminate them.

The same thing applies to new reviews in the Google Play market. I don't review apps there anymore because of that.

Weird. There must be some config problem somewhere on your PC or Google settings. But I don't blame you for sticking with the old maps. I would too, but I'm forcing myself to learn the new interface.

Yeah - I just can't be bothered to figure it out :). I know I should just buckle down and get used to it, as I'm having to do with the mobile apps. I'm due for a new work laptop soon, so perhaps once I have the new version running smoothly somewhere I'll expand my GMaps horizons.

The new Google Maps uses WebGL. I'd guess your problem is related to an incompatibility with WebGL.

Google has now discontinued the "classic" version altogether, despite a torrent of complaints about the new version being so buggy and hopeless.

Hello, Bing.

I noticed that a few days ago, when I couldn't revert to classic maps anymore. I hate the new version. :mad: :td: