According to iOS6 maps, North Melbourne station is in South Melbourne, Collingwood Station is in the CBD
In the Apple Store at Southland the other day, I noticed they had all the iDevices maps set to satellite.
It wasn’t hard to see why — it took all of a minute or two to find some glaring errors in the street maps. It’s not just that tram lines are completely missing; they’ve put whole railway stations in the wrong suburbs.
It’s been well over a month since iOS6 was released… I wonder how long it’ll take them to fix this stuff?
How do mistakes like this even happen?
Is this tram route map the wrong way round?
While I applaud Yarra Trams’ efforts to put more information on-board trams, this map threw me for a moment.
I’m used to seeing east (Box Hill) on the right, and west (Port Melbourne) on the left. This had it the other way around.
And before you say it: it wasn’t designed to match the actual orientation of the tram and the outside world, because there were copies of this map on both sides of the tram, so one was the right way around, and the other wasn’t.
Perhaps I need to just stop being such a map.square.
PS. I suspect the real reason for it being like this is they wanted the major route to be at the top.
Finding an ATM
Having moved offices to Latrobe Street, I wanted to know where the nearest ATM is — that is, those of my preferred (no fee) banks, St George or Westpac.
The St George ATM/Branch locator will only show five results — including Westpac ATMs.
Searching postcode 3000, it shows me those closest to the the corner of Bourke and Elizabeth Streets, none of which are west of Queen Street. I know of at least one ATM on William Street near Bourke Street, but even when dragging the map around, it won’t show any others.
The Westpac site seems a little better, but doesn’t appear to show St George ATMs, only Westpac ones.
I’ve sent some feedback to the St George people. Will be interested to see how/if/when they fix it.
Update lunchtime: The Commonwealth Bank locator has similar issues if you just enter a postcode, only showing the 5 closest. But it does have the option of entering a full address, but if you don’t spell La Trobe with a space, it (and others) assume it’s Little Latrobe Street, thus showing me ATMs several blocks away instead.
The ANZ one shows about 15, none nearby. If you search by street name, like Commonwealth, you have to put the space in La Trobe, otherwise it has real problems.
The NAB one seems to show all results, but in pages of 5 per page, and with no combined map, which is hopelessly unuseable. (Imagine that, in 2010!) It allows me to enter a full address, but it has the same problems with La Trobe as the Commonwealth does.
The most useless map ever
The Myki people finally posted some useful information on their web site, just days after the PTUA posted a Myki Q+A.
They’ve also posted this gem on the Myki web site: Under Maps / Metro trains, it purports to be a “Metro train zones” map.
What an utterly pointless creation. No reference point other than the bay. How does this help anybody at all?
(Stop press: I gave feedback to the TTA yesterday, and they appear to have already taken it offline.)
Mind you, it could be worse. Because it’s so uninformative, at least it’s not wrong.
Unlike this one, which appeared on stations in late-2003, and is riddled with errors:
Apart from the fact that it’s severely not-to-scale (Box Hill is not next to Belgrave, and neither are Clayton, Glen Waverley and Box Hill all adjacent; Ashburton is actually north of East Malvern), it manages to put some places in the wrong zones: Williamstown is actually well within Zone 1, whereas Laverton, Sunshine and others are on the zone overlap.
In both of these cases, you really have to wonder: What were they thinking?
Keith
I was playing around with the Wii Weather Channel. If you zoom out, then hold down the button as you flick the controller just so, you can send the Earth spinning around wildly.
Anyway, if one looks around southern Australia, various prominent cities and towns are highlighted.
One caught my eye: Keith.
Keith?
I’d never heard of Keith. Why was it highlighted alongside such significant settlements as Melbourne, Mildura, Bendigo, Bega (famous for its cheese, don’tcha know?) and Canberra?
Was it even real? Or had someone named Keith managed to hack into Fortress Nintendo and get a spot named after himself as a joke?
I checked. It turns out that Keith, South Australia is real.
I’m sure it’s a very nice place, but it does make me wonder why it’s so prominent on the map at that particular zoom level when it’s apparently only a town of 1200 people, while other nearby places such as Horsham (pop 14000), Warrnambool (pop 30000) and Mount Gambier (pop 23500) don’t rate.
