Between this and the Apple Music player, it’s great to see Apple finally take baby steps into actual web services (beyond the app clones inside iCloud.com)
- Doesn't seem very performant, panning behavior and zooming seems to redraw a lot unnecessarily, low framerate and not very smooth on good hardware
- Poor support for touch events, pinch zoom and pan didn't work for me on touchpad
- Looks to be using (PNG?) image tiles but and over-scaled canvas element, my laptop's fan came on during simple zoom and panning. I closed the tab and it promptly shut off.
The API seems okay but nowhere near as good as leaflet. MapboxGL has better performance imo.
I'm trying to understand what the compelling reason to use this would be? If you want the best quality basemaps, use Google Maps. If you want the most customizability and a great API, use leaflet. If you want a fancy map, use MapboxGL. If you like apple, use this??
This thing has been out for less than 24 hours. I’m sure they’ll need some time to refine and optimize it. Anyone remember how the very first Mapbox version compared in performance with respect to Google Maps?
> but you need a paid Apple Developer Program account.
Where was "paid" bit listed? You don't have to pay the yearly fee to have a developer account. I let my paid subscription expire a few years ago, and I can still login and do various things.
at this point, Apple would _pay you_ to use it if they thought it would help adoption. MapKit usage outside of iOS is a critical to the success of Apple Maps.
long term, I wouldn't be surprised if maps.apple.com gained a web experience, too
It really depends which country you're looking at. Usually Google Maps is better, but not always. China is a good example of a place where Apple Maps is far superior.
>It really depends which country you're looking at. Usually Google Maps is better, but not always. China is a good example of a place where Apple Maps is far superior.
What you really mean is that Google is so artificially handicapped by the Chinese government that Apple Maps is actually decent in comparison. I do not envy that situation.
