Topographical maps and hiking maps are coming to Apple Maps on the Mac, iPhone and iPad as of macOS Sequoia and iOS/iPadOS 18, due out this fall. The hiking maps will be at least for U.S. national parks, and will also be available in offline mode because hiking in areas without cell service is the point. Other features coming to Maps include custom walking routes and saved places. [Spatially Adjusted]

Upgrades to Apple Maps were announced on Monday at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference: see coverage from AppleInsider, Engadget and TechCrunch, as well as the video of the keynote itself (the Maps section starts at 29:47).

The changes will be coming to iOS 15, iPadOS 15, and macOS Monterey this fall. They include highly detailed city maps (for only a few cities at launch); a three-dimensional map for navigation that indicates, among other things, complex intersections; improved transit features such as bus route integration and next stop notifications; precise walking directions based on a scan of nearby buildings; and an interactive globe when zoomed out. (Note that not all of these features will be available on Intel Macs, which lack the Neural Engine in Apple’s own chips, nor on older iPhones or iPads with an A11 or earlier chip.)

The Weather app will also be getting temperature, precipitation and air quality maps (see TechCrunch coverage). And Italy and Australia were announced as the next countries to get Apple’s upgraded map layer.

Update 11 Jun: MacRumors has a roundup.

Update 15 Jun: Justin O’Beirne has been adding screenshots of Apple’s redesigned maps—its new new maps—to this page.

To be honest I’m not sold on using augmented reality to view virtual globes. It’s one thing to use AR to superimpose IKEA furniture in your living room: that makes sense, because it helps you visualize where the furniture would go and what it would look like. But it’s hard to see the utility of plunking a virtual globe in your living room: what’s the point of adding your surroundings as a backdrop? Case in point:

It’s neat but not particularly useful, is what I’m saying.

The Ordnance Survey’s OS Maps mobile app now has a new augmented reality mode. “Using the phone or tablet’s camera view, hills, mountains, coastal features, lakes, settlements, transport hubs and woodland in the vicinity are identified and labelled. If a label is pressed and there is a data connection, a page of useful information about that location is displayed, including nearby walks, photos and places to stay.” AR is very neat but battery-intensive; nevertheless this strikes me as a very useful application of the technology. [iOS App Store, Google Play]

“We made significant changes to all of our development processes because of it,” says Cue, who now oversees Maps. “To all of us living in Cupertino, the maps for here were pretty darn good. Right? So [the problem] wasn’t obvious to us. We were never able to take it out to a large number of users to get that feedback. Now we do.”

Apple senior vice president Eddie Cue, quoted in this Fast Company profile of Apple, on how the Apple Maps debacle changed Apple’s famously insular culture, opening things up to the point that they now have a public beta program. [James Fee]

Previously: A Preview of Maps in iOS 10.

The Barrington Atlas of the Greek and Roman World was a landmark in historical cartography: an atlas that pinpointed locations from classical antiquity on modern maps. The result of more than a decade’s work and $4.5 million in funding support (here’s the project website), the print version of the Barrington Atlas, which came out in 2000, was both enormous and expensive: larger than either the National Geographic or Times Comprehensive atlases,¹ and priced at an eye-popping $395.

Now, as I mentioned earlier, there’s an iPad version of the Barrington Atlas, which (they say) contains the full content of the $395 print atlas and costs only $20 (iTunes link). On that basis it’s a no-brainer: $20 is better than $395. (95 percent off!) Classicists with iPads who don’t buy this app have something wrong with them. But how does it work as a map app?

How do you create an iPad version of an existing print atlas? If you’re the National Geographic Society, with a century or more of cartography behind it, you’re more than able to put out a $2 app that includes several levels of map detail and can be panned and zoomed to your heart’s content. But if you’re the Barrington Atlas, you don’t have the same resources.

So what you end up with in the Barrington Atlas app are high-resolution versions of the original maps from the print version. These maps—which are marvellous, by the way—used the Lambert conformal conic projection: stitching them together to form a seamless single map would be a major effort, all the more considering that the maps were produced in the 1990s using Illustrator 6 on early PowerPC Macintoshes (the iPads on which this app runs are much more powerful computers). Instead, you browse the individual maps in a Cover Flow-style interface.

That’s not to say that the app is completely uninteractive. Pressing the compass button shows you the adjacent maps, so you can explore after a fashion.

Pressing the key button opens up the legend.

Navigation is also facilitated by the Locator tab, which allows you to select individual maps from the key map interface, below. (This also shows the Barrington Atlas‘s coverage: I bet you weren’t expecting it to include Tibet.)

All things considered, it’s a reasonable approach to presenting the information without having to start from scratch, particularly for an app that will not have a broad audience.

That said, I did find a few interface problems: page-turning was slow and sometimes unreliable (tapping worked better than dragging), and the Cover Flow browsing was a bit blocky. It crashed on me once or twice. I tested this app on a new iPad Air; I wonder how well it runs on an iPad 2, which is the minimum hardware required. And the app doesn’t save state: it doesn’t remember what page of the Introduction you were reading or what map you were consulting; reopening the app starts from scratch.

Not that these are deal-breakers—not for this kind of app. It works well enough, at least on top-of-the-line hardware, that those with an interest in this subject should be able to lay down their $20 without much hesitation. It beats $395, after all.

In 102 interactive color maps, this app re-creates the entire world of the Greeks and Romans from the British Isles to the Indian subcontinent and deep into North Africa. Unrivaled for range, clarity, and detail, these custom-designed maps return the modern landscape to its ancient appearance, marking ancient names and features in accordance with modern scholarship and archaeological discoveries. Geographically, the maps span the territory of more than seventy-five modern countries. Chronologically, they extend from archaic Greece to the Late Roman Empire.

It’ll be available on November 21: plenty of time for me to get a new iPad Air by then (it works on all iPads except the original).

Previously: Barrington Atlas.