Hi, this is Gary with MacMost Now.
On today's episode let's look at getting Goggle Maps back onto your iPhone.
Now a lot of fuss has been made about the loss functionality of removing Goggle Maps
from the iPhone in iOS 6.
Goggle Maps had things like street view that just aren't available in the new Maps app.
But you can easily get street view and other features back by using the Goggle Maps website.
There is a special mobile version that you can automatically go to on your iPhone.
You can even make this available as an icon on you home screen.
So on your iPhone you go into Safari and you simply browse over to maps.goggle.com/.
You will be taken to the mobile version of the Goggle map site.
It will also ask you to use you current location just as you would in the old maps app.
So this is what is called the web app.
It's a webpage, being in Safari.
But it works like an app because it really understands the iPhone.
The screen size.
It has icons and things that are easy for touch.
You will see the map in the middle looks exactly like the middle part of the maps app that
you were used to because it is exactly the same.
The same graphics.
So you are actually getting the same maps but the controls look a little different.
So at the top here you have got several controls.
This one here at the top allows you to zero in to your current location.
This one gives you directions so you tap on that and you can go from my location to another
destination.
You can choose multiple destinations.
Right away you can see some features that are not available in the maps app now that
were available in Goggle Maps.
Which namely you can have public transportation, walking, and biking directions.
That can be very useful.
You can plot the route and then you can decide to say let's do biking directions and then
go and you can see it will give us the full directions here and you can in addition to
that go to map view and see the maps.
Now the last button over here allows you to go in and has various options including turning
on and off layers such as traffic so you can get back that Goggle traffic if you liked
that better than one of the new maps app.
Another thing that you can do that I like is that you can sign in.
So for instance you can go in and sign in there and send it to your Goggle account and
that way you can have all sorts of different things saved like different places.
If I go into directions here you can see that I can sign in there and create my own maps
and star and save places and rate places using my Goggle account.
So that can come in handy and it's nice to be able to create your own maps just as you
can on web pages on Mac or PC.
Now the one inconvenient thing is that in order to get to this you have to launch Safari
and then maybe use a bookmark for maps.goggle.com and you go to the webpage.
But you can actually put this as an icon on your home screen.
So the way to do that would be to tap the share button at the bottom of the browser
there and you can share it to your home screen like that.
You can give it a name.
Now you can see it appears there as this icon right here.
I can tap on it and you go right to maps.
It almost seems like you are using a regular app.
You can in fact do that with any webpage that you go to.
So for instance you can go to MacMost.com and share and add to home screen and you now
have a MacMost app.
It just takes you to the MacMost website.
Another big missing feature from the new Maps app is street view.
Street view is a Goggle thing.
Goggle captured all these different images from all over the place and has a street view
function.
The new Maps app has the fly over function which is different and has some similar use.
But if you want street view you can go into Goggle maps here and then you can actually
zoom in and tap on any location you want.
So I'm going to just tap here and then you can see at the bottom I get various buttons
that tells me where I am.
I've got that little person button right there on the bottom right hand corner and I can
tap on that and I can jump into street view and get that same street view, the same images
I was viewing before in the Maps app.
This is something that Goggle just added this last week.
So that's how to get the prime functionality and a little bit more back on your iPhone
by adding Goggle Maps web app as an icon on your home screen and then you can use that
for what it is good for and use the new Apple maps for what it is good for.
For instance talk to Siri to give you turn by turn spoken directions.
I hope you found this useful.
Until next time this is Gary with MacMost Now.