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Comment by tcard | Hacker News Reader

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tcard·

Out of curiosity, I made a comparison between the two towns where most of my photos are taken as seen in GMaps vs. OSM.

http://cl.ly/133M1H3W2W362S2F0l13 http://cl.ly/2P2d3y042N1T0o2p390H

600k and 60k inhabitants respectively.

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As others have noted, Apple seem to be generating their own tiles from OSM data. ArsTechnica has a good screenshot here:

http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2012/03/apple-begins-using...

Dang... that makes GMaps look like Bing ;)

In my town (Santa Barbara, CA) OSM looks decent - not as many details as GMaps, but more than some others...

Interesting. From your screenshots, Apple's maps are so bad it's not even funny. It's just very, very bad. Steve would've never allowed such a thing to ship.

Is this a first sign that without an asshole with taste at the top, the erosion of Apple is inevitable?

You may be correct, but I'm not positive. These maps are used to give you an idea of where a photo was taken, not to provide navigation to it, so detail isn't quite as important. The other consideration is this is one data point. Perhaps Apple did a thousand of these and felt OSM was better.

Or, maybe Apple is going to quickly flame out.

The OSM images that tcard used are from openstreetmap.org, not from the iPhoto app.

My understanding is that Apple used the data from OSM to produce their own tiles, which, I believe, look much better than this.

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