Google today announced a handful of wearable and navigation updates, starting with public transit directions in Google Maps for Wear OS.
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I do wish they had live tracking of more bus opators
I wish they didn’t fuck the public transit directions in general, if I want to use them I used to be able to say “i just want to use the train”
Now it’s impossible because it automatically decides I wanted to use a bus to connect to each train stop, not allowing for the correct calculations to make a route based on train and foot traffic only. It’s not like I can just ignore the bus options because suddenly that means an hour walk. I’m back to the dark ages of printing out fucking directions
Fucking finally.
wtf i assumed it was present since version 0.9 beta.
What’s the point of having a smartwatch sized smartphone on the wrist if it can’t even give you directions?
it’s such an easy thing to code. They take ages for basic features.
How is it easy to code? No open source app I know of can even provide public transit directions, let alone provide turn by turn navigation for them.
Offi works quite well
I’ve never heard of it, but I can’t get it to work to check it out. Looks like it doesn’t support my country (well enough). It doesn’t seem to advertise turn by turn navigation for public transit, though, so I wonder how it compares.
It also doesn’t seem to have an Android Watch app, but perhaps smart watch functionality is part of the Android base app?
Crap, I forgot we were on a thread about smart watches. I wouldn’t know how it works on one, since I don’t own any.
But turk by turn works as good as it can for any public transport service. It tells me when and where I need to change. How long the change is and things like that. I assume a lot of it depends on the data provided by the transport company
That’s pretty cool! Google maps has had this for ages on Android, but the few open source apps that support the Dutch transit system don’t have it, unfortunately.
I have good hopes that Öffi will support Dutch transit eventually (it’s in alpha and there’s a central location and somewhat of a standard protocol that almost every possible public transport company uses), so maybe next time I try it, I’ll be able to use it.
I haven’t looked into the source code, but the little experience in smart watch development I have makes me think there are reasons this feature only made it to watches now; the batteries are tiny and the processors are slow, even compared to cheap budget phones.
Except the hard part was already done - the directions are calculated on the server anyway, so only the UI needed to be coded up.
Sure, assuming the GPS signal is alright, the bus route didn’t get redirected, there are no delays, there is no bus replacement service, the bus is even remotely on time, and a bunch of other perfect world public transport assumptions that never hold.
This stuff needs to be updated live, work in places with spotty internet connections, and have tons of other edge cases I probably didn’t even think of. Needing this stuff to work on a watch that may or may not be getting its data connection through a Bluetooth connection sure wouldn’t make it easier.
What may seem easy to an outstanding person is most definitely not easy in reality. There is so much more complexity involved in this, and not even speaking of the whole corporate nightmare new features have to go through.
okay. if they had never done it maybe. but its in Google maps already. So they already have all the data available. Making the code to show transit, with having access to their internal API’s is probably very easy.
Just look up a local bus provider API. Very easy to just make a request. Google probably has their own API already that bundles all transits from over the world.
