Navigation Pet Peeve: Solved!   (geekin)

I had a good experience today with the Google Maps mobile app; one of those moments where technology did exactly what I wanted it to do. It makes me think that the developers actually use it themselves and care about making it work for all the different ways people want to use it.

But first, my navigation pet peeve. The most frequent way I want to use a navigation device is to get around a traffic jam. I already know how to get where I'm going, but there is traffic in the way and the goal becomes to take a less efficient route.

This usually happens on a highway, so I get off at the first exit, fire up the navigation software at a traffic light, and type in the address of the place I want to end up. This is where every standalone GPS device I've ever used pisses me right the fuck off because the first thing it says is to make a u-turn and get back on the god damn highway. And then when I (obviously) don't make the u-turn, it's a series of "Recalculating... make a u-turn at [the next intersection]" until I've already figured out how to get halfway to where I want to go. Tekmology being unhelpful.

But today, I fired up the app on my phone after getting off the highway, and it actually told me something useful! Realization didn't dawn for a couple minutes, but I wasn't immediately instructed to flip a bitch every 30 seconds.

Now, who knows whether this is something that the developers had a meeting about or whether their product manager just made it a requirement, but however this fucking sweet feature made it into the app, thank you for solving my pet peeve! Now to find the next one...