Get lost, Windows 10 and Phone fans: No maps HERE on Microsoft's OS HERE, the mapping arm of Nokia that Microsoft didn't buy up when it acquired the Finnish manufacturer, has announced it's no longer going to be doing apps for Windows 10 and Phone devices. "In the last few months, we made the HERE apps compatible with Windows 10 by using a workaround that will no longer be effective after June …
Are you saying that the car entertainment unit is for entertaining the car - or for entertaining the people in the car?
It is people in the car, but they do not get a choice of what the OS is. They buy a car + infotainment system or an infotainment for retrofit.
Same as my Sony car stereos run Android. I do not get a choice on the subject - I bought a Sony (ditto for any vehicle bundling it). I actually know it is Android only because I have actually gone and read the license list on the about page of menu at the bottom of the unit settings. 99.9% of users will not get anywhere near that.
"Err... not people. Car entertainment units."
Hence the focus on handsets / OSs that are actually used. It's more than probable that linking a car's infotainment system to the handset is the way forward. Many third party headunits, and some OEM ones, already do this with Mirrorview or whatever it's called and don't bother having their own standalone GPS system for example.
Now if only LibreOffice 5 could gain some traction too... cogs slowly turn
We switched a while back, but now we need to work in 4 different languages we have issues with entering accented characters. On OSX, LibreOffice does not integrate with the OSX method of entering accented characters (where you can hold down a character longer and a selection pops up). I'm not quite sure why not, I guess there are software reasons that make this difficult but it has forced us to start looking at NeoOffice instead as LibreOffice's mechanism is quite frankly clumsy.
An alternative is that we equip all systems with keyboards that have all the accented characters present, like the Swiss keyboards but that leads to other issues such as people having to get used to a QWERTZ layout and coders not having direct access to the # sign :).
Haven't quite worked this one out yet. Not that NeoOffice is expensive, mind you - $10 is actually less than I think it's worth if it works (not keen on the App Store version as it limits Base in what it can access).
*"...On OSX, LibreOffice does not integrate with the OSX method of entering accented characters (where you can hold down a character longer and a selection pops up)..."
Try hitting:
* ALT+e followed by the vowel you want, to add an: áéíóú
* ALT+i followed by the letter you want, to add an: âêîôû
* ALT+u followed by the letter you want, to ad äëïöü
* ALT+n followed by n for an: ñ
* ALT+c to produce ç
* ALT+o to produce ø
[or, alternatively, switch your keyboard to use Irish layout and ALT+any vowel will type that vowel with an áéíóú, which saves an extra keystroke in languages which only use that type of accented character].
As an office system, LibreOffice has pretty much everything there to walk all over anything that Microsoft Office can do. No ribbons either.
Except that it has no email client. If they could develop an email client that could do a better job than Outlook, I suspect that they'd clean up!
"As an office system, LibreOffice has pretty much everything there to walk all over anything that Microsoft Office can do"
If you mean MS Office from 20 years ago maybe. To suggest it's an equivalent is simply not the case.
Also LibreOffice requires Java installed which is an absolute no along with Flash on any of my PCs.
Also LibreOffice requires Java installed which is an absolute no along with Flash on any of my PCs.
LOL, so you "don't use Flash or Java" but you use MS Office with its macro problems? You're not really one for consistency, are you?
You don't actually NEED Java. It's used in some functionality (I think macros, actually) but it works quite well without. As for being equivalent or not, who cares? For about 90% of users it delivers all the functionality they ever need, and the UI stays consistent between versions which means that upgrades don't immediately invoke a feature treasure hunt or training as has long been the case with MS Office - yet another saving in training costs as well as continued productivity.
The real problem for MS is that users switching to LO/OO become far less platform dependent as such documents render equally well on OSX and Linux. If it wasn't for Outlook they would have lost a lot more people already as budgets are getting tighter.
There's also the fact that ODF is a mature, organically developed document standard as opposed to MSOOXML which was thrown together in a hurry as a me-too (and it shows), but that has far less influence on user choice than it ought to have - I count myself lucky that I've been able to make it our corporate document standard. It means documents can be edited on any platform so if we change our minds at some point about our core OS it will not hamper migration. Open Standards make perfect business sense IMHO.
"LOL, so you "don't use Flash or Java" but you use MS Office with its macro problems? "
Macros are disabled by default in Office. Also our Group policy only allows signed and trusted macros to run.
"become far less platform dependent as such documents render equally well on OSX and Linux"
MS Office works just fine on OS-X. Pretty much no one uses Linux on the desktop so it's an irrelevance. However Office 365 web access works just fine on Linux.
"There's also the fact that ODF is a mature, organically developed document standard as opposed to MSOOXML "
Lucky then that MS Office provides more advanced and less buggy support for it than LibreOffice does...
"Lucky then that MS Office provides more advanced and less buggy support for it than LibreOffice does..."
Anyone who says that hasn't tried it. I work in a heterogeneous environment and Office constantly chokes on documents created by LibreOffice (4 and 5), often displaying conversion errors that put off users. Once they open the basic formatting is a shambles, with basic things like headers and other styles completely messed up. LibreOffice does a better job of native Office formats, so we often have to fall back on the MS formats to suit the lowest common denominator and keep everyone happy. If MS put some effort into ODF then it would work well for everyone.
I find it pretty amusing that (once again) a small project can do a better job supporting alternative formats to their own native ones than a large multinational software company. This is one of the painful downsides of relying on a large corporate vendor.
People pay for Office for a reason, that reason being it's the best option.
There are only two reasons left why people still fork out stupid shovels full of cash instead of using LibreOffice:
- Complex Excel spreadsheets (the stuff business decisions are made with if they are to defy any attempt at auditing)
- Outlook
Anyone who does any real presenting will have switched to Keynote by now on an iThing or a Mac, or Haiku Deck. Powerpoint has tumbled down the same death slope of usability as Visio has and died of featuritus. Call it the Microsoft effect.
"- Complex Excel spreadsheets (the stuff business decisions are made with if they are to defy any attempt at auditing)"
Whilst I share your skepticism about badly-written spreadsheets I have to say that LO calc be used for extreme spreadsheets - the major difference is the macro languages are different. Recalc. speed used to be slow - it's now very fast
@ Alan Bourke
OpenOffice/LibreOffice started life as a commercial product - "Star Office", made in Germany, ja?
Star Office is long-established; a German friend has documents that go back to its DOS version & was very happy that OpenOffice could read them.
Just as Microsoft chooses to give away some software applications to gain commercial advantage in other areas, Sun chose to do the same in open-sourcing OpenOffice.
I use both MS Office and LibreOffice; there really isn't much difference on a day-to-day basis. Each has its own annoyances...
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Better UI? When in a car at arm's length, and used for voice-guide navigation, the interface is almost invisible and the buttons are too small.
That UI may work on a desktop or near your face, but never in a car. So yes, it kind of replaces HERE Maps, but it's a bad replacement for HERE Drive.
The least they could do was open a migration path for all favourites from HERE.com to Windows Maps...
Well that's about it for winpho then.
MixRadio closed it's doors last month and now now mapping. They were the two things that really appealed to me about WinPho.
Without that really what's the incentive to stick with WinPho? Few apps, even the MS developed apps for their own producs are inferior to Android and Apple versions (Skype).
My 920 doesn't integrate with W10 any better than an Android phone.
I'm overdue a new phone now, I don't really like Andoid or Apple, BB looks like it's in it's deaththrows which did leave WinPho. But why would I buy from a company that appears to hate it's own products?
And I'm someone that really liked WinPho8.
At least for the area where I live, HERE maps are quite far from being excellent: their street maps have not been updated for at least four years; their aerial maps are from at least five years ago. Google maps are a little better, but not by much: their aerials have been updated three years ago, but the street map is also from four years ago.
Because most delivery drivers seem to use either HERE or Google maps, this is a bit of a problem: HERE users think that our place does not exist at all, while Google-fanciers wind up about 1/2 mile away.
On the other hand, Open Street Maps have excellent coverage around here, as well as most places I tend to travel to. If only they could slap together a decent route planner ...
Don't think that's anything specifically to do with the app somehow, unless it's not using the full capabilities of the GPS?
I often use Google Maps on commuter flights at speeds ranging from 0-500mph, altitudes from 0ft to 40,000ft, and never have any problems with it once the GPS locks on - and sluggish GPS lock-on isn't really an app issue.
Google Maps have a fixation with snapping to landmarks/roads known to it. I've ended up 10km off the mark due to it snapping to the wrong "closest known" country road. I suspect that's why it struggles tracking train journeys.
HERE often insists on saving points of interest as addresses, not the GPS coordinates. A real PITA if a street name appears in different suburbs/towns (Main Road, anyone?). In HERE's favour again, it's very accurate if you have a house number in a street, Google Maps just aims for the midpoint of the road.
@CliveS I think you already know the answer. The dual sim Moto G 2014 got Marshmallow 6.0 yesterday, it runs Here Maps perfectly, and you can store the 30GB of offline Worldwide Maps on a (up to 128GB) microsd. Its a good cheap 'really does the job' Android phone.
You may want to give the Windows 10 Maps app a try. It has most of the features HERE Maps and Drive have, it adds some new features for in-car navigation such as route selection and lane hints, and it certainly uses the same HERE map data. Of course you wouldn't know any of that if you are a journalist with an iPhone and an itch to write a clickbait piece of "news" after reading first 20% of a press release.
Well that puts the kibosh on my theory that Microsoft had grown up and had stopped trying to strangle its partners.
Looks like Embrace, Extend, Extinguish is still alive and well (and for HERE, it's at the phase where the original partner is marginalised and Microsoft's version of the very same thing is pressed on the gullible populace).
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