Phil online

GPS Navigation! One the primary features of the carputer is live GPS maps and routing. I use Street Atlas — Road Warrior Edition, circa 2000. It works fine, but it has the most gawd-afwul user interface I’ve ever seen on a commercial product, bar none. Double that when all you have is a dinky touchscreen to control it.

I am hopeful the new 2005 version will be a big interface improvement, but the screen shots I’ve seen so far do not look promising. The map improvements are worth the upgrade, though… supposedly.

I’m hoping that I can build a custom GUI around the existing application that let me do the basic things that one must do on the road with a GPS map. But it all depends on how well the software responds to standard Windows messages.

Basically here is all I need to do:

1. Route to cursor. I want to click somewhere on the map and the software should tell me how to get there from where I am. It should not require me to create a new route which joins all the other routes I’ve ever created, and then later require me to save (or not save) the route for future reference.
2. Mark a waypoint. I hate the name “waypoint”. But it just means I want to mark the map with a location so I can reference it later. Like, I want to add a flag for the Fox Theater downtown because I’m always forgetting where it is.
3. Route to a waypoint. It’s hard to click the exact spot on the road I want to route to. I should be able easily to choose saved waypoints as my destination.
4. Find a restaurant. I need a quick touchscreen-friendly way to find nearby restaurants, or gas stations, or whatever. Some top-five list of categories would be fine.
5. Recalculate my route if I take a different road. SA 2005 supposedly has this feature.

Aside from the road-based routing, my cheap little mapping GPS receiver does all this for me with about 4 buttons. Why, oh why, can’t the Delorme folks get it through their thick heads that a simple interface is better? For touchscreen users, the Delorme software is almost useless.

What I like about the Delorme software is the maps. They’re almost always dead on. I noticed some errors recently, but nothing so egregious as my Magellan GPS’s omission of several major 10-year-old highways. But Delorme has some competition in this area lately, and it looks good. Some of it is highly touchscreen-capable. TomTom Navigator looks promising, but is for handhelds only.
Routis is designed for handhelds but also runs on Windows. Advantage: It’s very touchscreen friendly!
There’s also some opensource stuff being done, but it’s still preliminary.

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 31st, 2004 at 1:24 am and is filed under Carputer, Design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.