Tuesday, October 20, 2015

OS X El Capitan - Maps Impresses

Google Maps have been the 'gold standard' and that's been the preferred tool here at the Rockhouse for years.  Mapquest faded from favor years back although it was a great service in its time.

However, it did not give a satisfactory set of directions for the route from Fort Worth to the Dallas VA Hospital.  They were accurate but cumbersome to display and still needed to be hand-scribed to get them onto a note to take to the car.


Enter El Capitan with the new-and-improved Apple Maps.  We are well-pleased.

Directions from here to there are presented in a much more palatable way but there's a much bigger advantage in Apple's improved Share function across all of its applications.  The map could be shared from the screen I was reviewing on the iMac such that it went to the iPad with no further intervention required.

That map is now on the iPad and no-one had to hand-scribe anything.  Plus it's much easier to read as Yevette's chicken scratching is like that of most people:  she's the only one who can read it.


Apple really scored with El Capitan.  There are no big gee whiz changes but the improvements are immediately effective and useless.  I'm sold already on the improvements to Safari and Notes so now Maps gets added to the list of stand-out changes in this release.

For general system improvement, everything is faster in small ways.  Launching applications is quicker and those types of system functions are all improved in various subtle ways.  This is not a Big Bang release but it's one hell of useful release and maybe you like that even better.

No comments: