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That was quick
Aug. 20th, 2012 05:57 pmFor almost a month, I've been playing around with a social mapping/traffic program called Waze. I love the concept of crowdsourcing traffic data, but Waze has some frustrating issues. I was hanging in there, assuming that it would get better with time, until today. Today, I hopped into the car and turned on Waze, and it popped up a little screen asking "Would you like me to navigate to 'Work'?" (only with fewer words, because screen space is more precious than polite grammar). And I said "Holy mother of god, no, stop that shit." Because I do not want technology that thinks it is smarter than I am, and I do not want a navigation program to try and tell me how to get somewhere I already know how to get to. I just want Waze to show me the map with the traffic data on it, and let me make my own decisions.
More annoying than that? It's got a little countdown, after which it will choose its default answer... which is "Why yes, please do navigate to that location." And there is, as far as I can tell after going through all the settings screens, absolutely no way to a) make it stop asking me if I want it to navigate instead of waiting for me to ask it, or b) change the default answer.
Since Waze claims that it learns your preferences, I took a shot in the dark and hoped that by saying "No, don't navigate" it would stop asking me. This is not the case; when I started the app up on the way home, it offered to navigate to 'Home'. Since I was busy driving, I did not get a chance to push "No" before it defaulted to "Yes"... whereupon its routing software, the one Waze touts as learning your favorite routes and taking you the ways you prefer, told me to take I-75. I hate taking I-75 during anything even remotely resembling rush hour. I'm not sure that I've EVER taken I-75 home while running Waze, but it's certainly not one I've taken OFTEN while running Waze.
And thus ends my experiment with Waze, because while I can deal with the frustrations I'd been having (no way to mark a road as closed, because to report anything you must be on the road in question; no way to mark how FAR an issue extends, so that 10 feet of construction looks exactly the same as 3 miles of it; map tiles that virtually never update, even after the big Waze announcement that they brought up a dedicated server for updating map tiles and updated all the map tiles), actively annoying me is a delete-the-app offense.
More annoying than that? It's got a little countdown, after which it will choose its default answer... which is "Why yes, please do navigate to that location." And there is, as far as I can tell after going through all the settings screens, absolutely no way to a) make it stop asking me if I want it to navigate instead of waiting for me to ask it, or b) change the default answer.
Since Waze claims that it learns your preferences, I took a shot in the dark and hoped that by saying "No, don't navigate" it would stop asking me. This is not the case; when I started the app up on the way home, it offered to navigate to 'Home'. Since I was busy driving, I did not get a chance to push "No" before it defaulted to "Yes"... whereupon its routing software, the one Waze touts as learning your favorite routes and taking you the ways you prefer, told me to take I-75. I hate taking I-75 during anything even remotely resembling rush hour. I'm not sure that I've EVER taken I-75 home while running Waze, but it's certainly not one I've taken OFTEN while running Waze.
And thus ends my experiment with Waze, because while I can deal with the frustrations I'd been having (no way to mark a road as closed, because to report anything you must be on the road in question; no way to mark how FAR an issue extends, so that 10 feet of construction looks exactly the same as 3 miles of it; map tiles that virtually never update, even after the big Waze announcement that they brought up a dedicated server for updating map tiles and updated all the map tiles), actively annoying me is a delete-the-app offense.
