Thursday, March 8, 2012

iPhoto and OpenStreetMap

Jonathan Bennett (via Casey Johnston):

Yesterday Apple launched iPhoto, its photo management app, for the iPad and iPhone… and we’re rather pleased to find they’re the latest to switch to OpenStreetMap.

[…]

The OSM data that Apple is using is rather old (start of April 2010) so don’t expect to see your latest and greatest updates on there. It’s also missing the necessary credit to OpenStreetMap’s contributors; we look forward to working with Apple to get that on there.

Not surprising that Apple is moving away from Google Maps, but I didn’t expect them to go with OpenStreetMap. I love the idea of the project, and the maps sometimes have interesting markings that Google is missing, but they just don’t look very good.

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It is very interesting and relevant that the Apple tiles (at least the ones in iPhoto) also look either weird or like crap, depending on the specific detail you investigate.


Fortunately, the design of OSM maps can be customized.

http://mapbox.com/blog/announcing-mapbox-streets/

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