10 Things You May Not Know You Can Do In Mac Maps

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Today let me show you some things you may not know you can do in the Maps app on your Mac.

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The Maps app has been around on the Mac for awhile now. It's accumulated a lot of cool interesting features. First here are some things you probably know that you can do but not everybody does. You can switch views. You've got your regular map view that looks like this. But you can click here and then switch to Transit Lines which will show you transit lines instead of the highways. What you get of course depends on your location. So here in Denver we see the Light Rail Lines. In other cities you may see subways, buses lines, things like that. You also have Satellite View. This will give you satellite imagery instead of just all the streets and if you zoom in using the Plus button here at the bottom right the satellite view is pretty detailed. Now on top of all of that you can switch to 3D view here. Click that and everything goes into 3D.

Now let's go back to the default view and you can see buildings here represented by little 3D models. You'll find this more commonly in big cities but it's slowly spreading to just about everywhere. It's particularly good in downtown areas like this. Now you can rotate using the little compass control here at the bottom. Just click it and drag it up or down to rotate around. If you switch to satellite view it's going to use satellite imagery on top of the 3D models. So now you get this real 3D image of a downtown area. You can zoom in pretty far. It's really great for getting to know an area before you go to visit it. You can also use this control here on the right to adjust the angle of the 3D view.

Now to zoom in and zoom out on any view you can use the plus and minus buttons here. But you also can go here to the Scale and click and drag right or left. So this allows you to kind of scroll to change the scale. If you want to find a location you can click on the Sidebar button here and you can search for the location. But you can also use longitude and latitude if you like. So, for instance, you can search for a longitude and latitude like this and it will take you to a particular spot and show you what's there.  You can use two numbers separated by a comma but you can also use other formats as well. So for instance looking up on Goggle the longitude and latitude for a landmark I can copy that and if I were to paste that in, formatted just like that, it will find that location. So here we've got Stonehenge and yes, Stonehenge is actually there in 3D either with models or using satellite imagery. Also note that anytime you're looking at place information you should also see longitude and latitude there. So you can get those values as well as use them in a search. You can't copy and paste from here but you can go and copy a location. If you paste that location, if you notice, you'll get the longitude and latitude in the URL.

Now the app itself actually has some features a lot of people don't use. One is to use multiple windows. So I can create a new window and have a second, third, fourth map's window open all at the same time. But I could also use Tabs. So I can have multiple maps in multiple tabs which really helps trip planning and things like that. When you're looking a street names sometimes they can appear a bit too small. So you can go to Maps, Preferences and there's an option for Larger Labels which will increase the size of the street names. Also notice the control here for Always Use Light Map Appearance. We see light map appearance now because I'm in Light Mode. But if I go into System Preferences and then switch to Dark Mode you could see Maps looks pretty good in Dark Mode as well. Now you may have also notice, in Preference's here, there's Weather conditions and Air Quality. So if you have those both turned on you'll see Weather and Air Quality at the bottom left. The cool thing about that is it will change automatically as you move. So here I am down in the city but if I move up into the mountains you could see the temperature dropping, the air quality improving. You can click on either the Weather or Air Quality and it will take you to a website that will give you detailed information like the forecast. Here's for air quality. Note you won't see Weather and Air Quality if you zoom too far out because eventually you've got too large of an area and it can't give you a temperature for this entire range and there may be places where there simply isn't temperature or air quality reported. 

Now if you want to save a copy of the map you're looking at in standard format you don't have to screenshot or anything like that. You can actually go to File, Print and then instead of printing you can use the PDF button here to Save as a PDF directly or open up in Preview. Then when in Preview you can use the Markup Tools here and be able to draw things, add arrows, and things like that to the PDF. To get directions, click this button here and then you can type a From location and a To location or you can start off with a location by clicking here and then you can click Directions and you can see it includes that place there. You just need to fill in the other one and it will give you various directions and you can click to select the route that you want. You can also switch between Driving Directions, Walking Directions, Public Transit Directions, or Biking Directions. Biking Directions, just like Transit, are only going to be available in some locations. There are options for each one of these. So, for instance, for Driving you can select Avoid Tolls, Avoid Highways. For other transportation you can select what types of transportation you're willing to take. You also have defaults for these in Preferences under Route Planner. When you have a Route Planner like that and you go to File, Print it will actually Print out the different steps of that route. So you can see the Printout or PDF that you might export is going to look something like this with a little map for each step of the way.

A fairly new addition to Maps on the Mac is Look Around. If you click and hold to select a spot on a street, usually in one of the major cities, you could see Look Around here. There's also a button in the upper right hand corner there. Click Look Around and it will give you this great view that you can use the mouse to click and drag and look around a 360 degree view of that location. You could also use the Trackpad with two fingers to zoom in and out on the image. The images are pretty high quality. You could use this to take a drive. So if you see the road ahead of you just double click on a spot on the road and you move forward. So you can basically drive a route virtually before doing it in real life. There's also a Picture-In-Picture mode for Look Around. Click here and now Look Around is in a little box here. Now you can see the binoculars showing you where you are. As you move around it will show you there. You could also click and drag to move the binoculars to another spot. 

But what about the information that's on the map? If you find a location you can click on it and you get all sorts of information about it. If you find some information is wrong you can scroll to the bottom and there's Report an Issue. Click that and it allows you to adjust the location and send information about what could be wrong and submit that to Apple. Presumably somebody reviews that and implements a change if it makes sense. You can also Add a Missing Place. If you click and hold at a spot it'll add a marked location at the bottom. You could click and add a missing place and make your suggestion. 

So as you can see over the years the Maps App on the Mac has become a very feature filled and capable application. There's still some ways to go though. For instance, I'd love it in the future if you could have a way to have a route with multiple stops.