I find it interesting that they recently introduced location sharing to Google Maps as a new feature... which it had back in 2009, until they got rid of it.

They had tons of handy features in Google Maps before it was redesigned using Material Design. We used the route elevation data often to plan hiking trips with our parents to determine if they would be able to make a trek. The map scale was absent from the first couple releases and when they reintroduced it, it would only appear on zoom and then vanish. It took 3 or 4 more releases for them to finally add an option buried in the settings to make it always on.

I'd like to say they did this to present a clean minimalist app but the recent incarnations of it are more cluttered than the pre Material Design version. Sure you can tap on the map to minimize the clutter and then tap again to make it go away completely but tapping also drops a pin if you hold it for a sixteenth of a second longer. And I hope your touchscreen isn't super sensitive because it'll detect that flutter as a double tap and then you're just zooming.

If you'd like to plan trips that have elevation data, I highly recommend komoot.com. It uses OpenStreetMap, and is a great tool for planning hiking or cycling trips.

I'll check it out, thanks. We were using Maps in a more adhoc manner when touring Scotland. It was great, now not so much.

For any serious trip abroad I use OSMand (but only on Android) ... you can use hiking routes (GPX), all offline (great if you have no phone signal). Also helped me more than once for parking or finding the next public toilet (haha). You can even using for skiing, biking or navigation on the water.

And regarding elevation it seems it is also there inside: https://github.com/osmandapp/Osmand/issues/1795

OSMand has the worst UX I have ever experienced. Hands down.

Personally I use Gaia GPS and Pocket Earth for hiking/nature.

When was the last time you used it? 2 years ago I would agree.

The ability to show photo hotspots on the map and look at the photos was really handy for planning trips to unfamiliar places (or even familiar ones, really), but AFAI can tell it's gone now. Seems it was part of some service they bought, integrated, then killed.

I believe you can get the photos by using the street view person. (That is, drag the street view person over the map and the photos show up as pins)

It was part of Google+ until very recently. So my guess is, that they just moved it.

Last part of your comment reminds me of the birth & death of javascript [0]

[0] https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/the-birth-and-death...

It makes some amount of sense because there's less to maintain and more cultural knowledge of the new codebase. Instead of saying "We're removing features from Picasa because nobody here knows how they work and everyone's scared to change things", they can say "We have a shiny new project here that will eventually be better than Picasa". It's a nice PR stunt.

I can tell you for a fact though that at least some of the senior Engineers who developed Picasa are still at Google.

None of which are on the photos team or have the time to rewrite it for the newer stacks.

That is true.

> Good they cannot convert Chrome itself as a web app :D

http://trevorlinton.github.io/

Could they presumably write it as a non-native app? Would there be any issues with that? Presumably the "chrome" around a webpage isn't particularly intensive?

Firefox wants to do that:

https://github.com/browserhtml/browserhtml

Can't do cross-origin requests. It would need to be an electron-style app.