Like most Mac users, I’m a zealot. I love my Macs, so when I find something that they can’t do well, I’m frustrated. GPS software seems to be one of those areas.
All I wanted was a nice, simple piece of Canadian, street navigation software that supported GPS and would do voice directions. Well, I’ve been searching for several weeks now, and the only software I’ve found that might do it is Route 66.
I haven’t tried it because I haven’t been able to get a copy in Ottawa. [Of course, you basically can’t get any mac software in Ottawa, but that’s the subject of another rant.] Given the rather negative comments I have read about Route 66 (terrible ui, buggy, the cheapest possible port of the windows version, etc.) I’m not willing to buy it before trying it, and there didn’t seem to be a demo version available.
I did buy MacGPS Pro which claims to be “the ultimate Macintosh mapping software for GPS communication”. This may actually be true, given the state of the industry, but it certainly wasn’t what I was looking for: manual waypoints, maps cost extra, no route planning. Basically, it was a total bust. This might be useful if you were doing marine navigation, or some such, but it’s not for road travellers.
I haven’t found anything else for the Mac that looked promising. Part of that is because I am looking for Canadian mapping info. There seemed to be a couple of other choices if you were going to be U.S. only.
So, I tried looking for palm software instead.
I wanted to get TomTom, but it doesn’t look like they sell the “software only” version any more, or if they do, it wasn’t clear from their web site. I asked a question on their tech support pages, but haven’t gotten a response.
After much googling, I found Mapopolis, which is close to being exactly what I wanted. I find the map display to be somewhat ugly, but it has all the features I want. There are two issues with it, however:
- As soon as I connect the GPS to it, the HD light on my LifeDrive starts flickering constantly. This continues as long as the GPS is connected. Given that the intended use would be for 8..10 hours of continuous driving, I don’t imagine my drive would last very long. The guys at Mapopolis are aware of the problem, and are looking at fixes (before you write to me: yes, I am running the latest version).
- One of the tech guys at Mapopolis claims that there are very few BT GPS solutions that work well with the Palm.
Most do NOT work reliably with the new Palm architecture. Only the MC BTGPS we sell from our website and the Globalsat 338 have new microcode that handles the Palm LOOKAWAY.
Needless to say, I don’t have either of those, but an MG668 instead.
So where does that leave us? I found a copy of Microsoft Streets & Trips for Windows, and I’m running it on VirtualPC. It still doesn’t do voice navigation, but it has maps of everywhere I wanted to go in Canada, reasonably good route planning, and a professional looking GUI. Connecting it to the GPS was trivial, and I have proven that it all works together well. Given that we’re leaving this week, that’s likely to be the best I can do, but man is it frustrating.
Oh, well.
Update (14:46): TomTom got back to me. Apparently, you can order just the software by calling them directly. Unfortunately, it’s $150 (probably US), so I guess I’ll have to see if anybody in Ottawa stocks TomTom gear; that’s too much money to just buy it based on reputation alone.
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