Where I’ve had a wish to do this is when we need to canvass all the people registered Green Party within a specified district. Once I have all the locations “pinned” on the map, I can make up a driving route that efficiently wends its way through all those streets and hits all those houses & apartments. I wasn’t asking the map site to come up with the route, just to display each address as a pin while continuing to display the previously inputted addresses with a pin so that they’d accumulate. Google Maps at some point stopped doing that the way they used to – older pins would start disappearing from the map at a certain point. (For all I know, they fixed that, but first they broke it).
that is about the way it looks to me. Doesn’t bother me though. I can differentiate the roads vs non-roads. I am not seeing your problem here. Google maps does make mistakes, but the other 99% of the time, it gets me where I need to go. ?
It takes me 20 minutes of staring to figure out what routes would take me from one point on the map to another. I basically can’t differentiate the roads from the non-roads. There isn’t enough contrast. If it weren’t for the road labels I would not be able to tell you whether there were any roads on that screen at all.
It wasn’t originally like that. They had better contrast on their default map screen, plus you could switch to other color schemes.
If all you’re doing is adding pins to a map, that should work fine. It’s under Google Maps > Your Places > Maps and then click on “Create Map” all the way on the bottom of the left panel. I’m looking, and I have a map with 155 pins saved to it, so it should handle 75 fine. This is just a map with pins in it, though, not directions or anything like that (which it sounds like you don’t need.) You have a choice of 30 colors/shades with each pin.
It’s difficult to tell what AHunter3’s monitor shows, though. I could differentiate the roads fine on the screenshot, as well, but I do have a calibrated monitor. That said, he does have a point. It does feel to me like there could be a smidge more contrast or at least an option to change the color scheme for those who have difficulty making out the contrast or are on monitors with settings that may make it difficult to see the distinction between the roads and the backgrounds. I was Googling the problem, and it seems a lot of people have this issue, and it seems the solution is to adjust the contrast and white balance of the monitor, but there really should be a way to adjust the look of the map. I mean, the API allows you to use your own custom colors, so why not give users of Google maps the option, especially as, monitor issues aside, it would be helpful for those with eyesight problems that make it difficult to detect relatively small to medium changes in tone.
I think Google deliberately uses low contrast for the general map so that the information that they overlay on it shows up more clearly. This is actually a good thing in most cases, especially when navigating. My car navigation system does not do this, and it’s practically impossible to quickly glance at the map and pick out the route it’s trying to show me from the dense mess of streets. (That fact that it doesn’t autozoom like Google Maps does makes it worse.) A passenger of mine actually burst out laughing when he first saw the car’s map, which at that point looked like a Jackson Pollock painting. On the other hand, if you’re just browsing the map itself I can see where you might want more contrast, although personally I have no trouble reading it. It would be nice if there were a contrast option, but if it has to be only one way, I prefer the current low contrast model.
I am surprised by the people posting here who assume that GPS/mapping software works so well.
The news regularly reports on people getting sent down non-existent roads and what not by their GPS systems.
There’s an error in my own little neighborhood just a short distance away. Google shows a road going on well past it’s actual ending. I’ve reported it twice to Google and I just checked and it’s still wrong.
If you try to drive that stretch of non-road it’s not going to go well for you. Esp. if you are driving a truck.
Several years ago we had several people in town for some big events. I noticed that it took a long time for the out of towners to get from A to B or back. Turns out their map software was taking them thru a side street rather than the freeway nearby. So I printed up directions and handed them out to show people the right way to go.
They still followed their GPS. They were still late all the time.
So someone printing out instructions on how to get somewhere is a good thing and people need to pay attention to that. Assume that a computer generated route may not be the best route or even correct.
I’m at work and the screenshot I took at home definitely shows with more contrast on this screen than on my laptop’s screen. Still not as contrasty as I would like but I can see the roads in a way that I can’t at home. (I should play with the display settings, too).
Maybe if they shake their fists at it harder and mumble about kids these days and new-fangled inventions, things will work better for them.
This reminds me to delete the Waze app from my phone. I tried using it twice while on vacation recently and it screwed up the route both times.
It’s similarly bad for me when using Firefox, but just fine using Chrome.