Last week, Apple finally released its redesign of Apple Maps. It comes with new features such as being able to see labels for stores and other attractions in airports and malls, sharing ETAs and current flight statuses.
I was fortunate to find a reason to use Apple Maps and travel around my city with it. It is Columbus, Nebraska, which in my experience, is not a city well-known for its tech. However, during my short time there…well, let’s just say that I have seen a few Redbox kiosk machines get the NFC readers on them, enabling them to accept Apple Pay.
I tested Apple Maps in my area by going to three different places. The first was to a Casey’s General Store and that was easy because it was near my apartment.
My next stop was a Walgreens (where I purchased a couple items with Apple Card and got my three percent in Daily Cash). What I liked about that was that for the first time ever, I saw the stoplights featured in Apple Maps. It was a feature that I wanted for a while…I just didn’t know that I wanted it.
The last stop that I made was to pay my rent to my landlord. I do it the old-fashioned way by actually going to his house and giving him a check. With that said though, this was where I saw a lot of the changes to Apple Maps. When it came to the stoplights, one thing that always messed me up was telling me to turn was that Siri would tell me to turn on “insert street name here.”
Now the app tells me to turn on the street at the stoplight. For me, it just makes it a little more organized and helped me while I was driving my car, which is always a plus.
It might sound like such a small change, but it was one that we needed. It’s made the experience so much better and I cannot wait to use it more in the future.
