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A tech guide outlines how Google Maps' built-in tools—arrival-time planning, color-coded traffic updates, turn-by-turn voice navigation, and offline map downloads—can simplify driving for older users. The app is pre-installed on most Android phones and available free on both the Google Play Store and Apple's App Store.
A 2014 Renault Latitude owner discovered that the car's infotainment system blocks access to the clock settings menu unless a navigation map SD card is inserted. After the previous owner discarded an outdated, non-functional SD card, the new owner found no way to adjust the time for daylight saving changes through official menus, eventually resorting to jailbreaking the system to regain control.
Google Maps is now displaying trees in red, orange, and yellow hues along navigation routes in select US metro areas, replacing the usual green foliage. The company confirmed via X that this seasonal visual update will remain active through November 30, appearing within its Immersive Navigation interface for Android Auto.
Purdue computer science professor Aniket Bera's IDEAS Lab posted a video showing a quadcopter autonomously following a person through dense woods using only onboard computing, without GPS, maps, or cloud processing. The drone uses an occlusion-prediction method to estimate the target's path when trees block its view, and relies on open-source navigation tools including SUPER and FAST-LIO, originally developed by the University of Hong Kong's MaRS Lab, despite Bera's claim his team built the system from scratch.
Android Auto includes settings that let drivers swap the position of the map and media player, mirror their phone's wallpaper onto the car display, force day or night mode on maps, and disable automatic media playback at startup. Wallpaper mirroring must be enabled from the car's Android Auto settings rather than the phone, via a toggle for 'Use Phone's Wallpaper'.
Strava rolled out three route-related updates: natural-language search for routes and points of interest, an expanded and more curated route database, and route cards that display real user photos and activity data. The app also now lets users continue following saved routes offline, with workout data syncing once a connection returns. Strava said additional features, including community-sourced route details, web-based Maps, and subscriber-only turn-by-turn audio navigation, are coming soon without a specified release date.
A tech review highlights five navigation apps for Apple CarPlay that it says outperform Apple Maps in certain scenarios. Waze is singled out for drivers facing heavy traffic, thanks to real-time alerts from other drivers about accidents, speed cameras and congestion. The Google-owned app also includes Gemini-powered Conversational Reporting, letting users log incidents by voice instead of tapping the screen.
Ui-te-Rangiora is a legendary Polynesian navigator from Rarotongan oral tradition said to have sailed south aboard the vessel Te Ivi o Atea and reached a frozen, foggy region called Tai-uka-a-pia. A 19th-century reading by Stephenson Percy Smith interpreted this as a description of Antarctic ice floes, leading some to credit the navigator with discovering Antarctica centuries before European explorers.
Engineers at Delft University of Technology developed a lightweight tactile sensor modeled on animal whiskers, allowing small drones to detect obstacles by touch rather than vision. The design targets ultra-compact rescue drones, which often operate in smoke-filled or dark environments where cameras and lidar fail. Professor Salwa Hamaza said the sensor must be lightweight, low-latency and low-power to work on such drones.
Marshallese navigators built stick charts from coconut-frond midribs, shells and sennit fiber to represent ocean swell patterns and island locations across the Pacific. Each chart was so personal in design that typically only its maker could fully interpret and use it for canoe navigation. The practice declined after World War II amid new electronic navigation tools, reduced inter-island canoe travel, and disruption from US nuclear testing at Bikini Atoll.
Waze, the crowdsourced navigation app owned by Google since 2013, includes a 'Drive to friends & family' feature that lets users start directions to a saved contact's address without typing it in manually. The feature requires granting Waze access to a phone's contact list, which can later be revoked through device settings on iPhone or Android.
Google Maps allows users to set or edit a 'home' shortcut via the web or mobile app for faster navigation to their most frequent destination. The feature can be adjusted whenever someone moves or hasn't yet configured a home address.