*I’ve decided to change my blogpost day to Monday and shorten the posts while I’m in school.

It’s been a few months since Apple announced it would they would create their own map app, no longer relying on google maps. I’ve linked to a few articles below. I read somewhere (I can’t remember where) that apple has hired real cartographers to run their maps department while google hired computer programmers. I’m curious to see how this turns out.

• How Google Built its Maps – Atlantic
• How Google Earth Changed the World – the Independent
• A side-by-side look at Google vs Apple Maps – Gizmodo

With the advent of GoogleMaps everyone became an amateur cartographer. But in order to make maps that display more specific information you need to be able to use a program like ArcGIS and you need some rudimentary knowledge of programming. Is this a problem? In my Human Computer Interaction (HCI) class we’re learning that it is never the User’s fault if they can’t get something to work. Is it okay for some fields to require specialist knowledge? Why/Why not?

On a personal level I’m trying to figure out if it’s worth it to learn enough about computers and programming to write my own programs or whether I just need to learn how to use the crappy existing ones well enough for my needs.