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Road trip planning software
Feb. 25th, 2008 09:14 pmAnyone have suggestions?
Mapping between known destinations is easy, I could just do that online or grab a triptik from AAA. What I'm looking for is something like what AAA Map 'N Go does, except one that's been updated in the last 10 years. I could plan a basic route and then say "show me things in these categories within x miles of my route."
I just tried MS Streets & Trips. It's miserable. It does the above mentioned function, but it's not geared for my kind of travelling. It has about a billion restaurants and nightclubs, airports, train stations, etc. The only categories I'm interested in are "museums" and "landmarks", each of which return hundreds to thousands of hits on a 1000 mile trip. There are no sub-categories. Landmarks seems to contain anyone who emailed Microsoft and asked to be put on the list. This means that a national park has equal billing to "Sintered Specialty Products" and no way to filter the list down to stuff that you'd actually want to go to.
The reviews by people who have used Streets & Trips for years say that every update makes the program worse and the maps less accurate; most people recommend trying to find an older copy on the shelves.
Seems like Streets & Trips has just about run everyone out of business though. I'll try Delorme Street Atlas 2008 I guess, but my experience with Delorme has been that they have horrid maps and a laughable user interface. They wrote the AAA thing but back in 2001 when I bought it, that was only a "pretty bad" user interface.
I may have to get down to ordering state guides from AAA and spending a lot of time reading. I'll probably go ahead and install the 2001 copy of AAA Map 'N Go that I have; the tourist traps and such are probably about the same along most routes and it'd be a good starting point.
Mapping between known destinations is easy, I could just do that online or grab a triptik from AAA. What I'm looking for is something like what AAA Map 'N Go does, except one that's been updated in the last 10 years. I could plan a basic route and then say "show me things in these categories within x miles of my route."
I just tried MS Streets & Trips. It's miserable. It does the above mentioned function, but it's not geared for my kind of travelling. It has about a billion restaurants and nightclubs, airports, train stations, etc. The only categories I'm interested in are "museums" and "landmarks", each of which return hundreds to thousands of hits on a 1000 mile trip. There are no sub-categories. Landmarks seems to contain anyone who emailed Microsoft and asked to be put on the list. This means that a national park has equal billing to "Sintered Specialty Products" and no way to filter the list down to stuff that you'd actually want to go to.
The reviews by people who have used Streets & Trips for years say that every update makes the program worse and the maps less accurate; most people recommend trying to find an older copy on the shelves.
Seems like Streets & Trips has just about run everyone out of business though. I'll try Delorme Street Atlas 2008 I guess, but my experience with Delorme has been that they have horrid maps and a laughable user interface. They wrote the AAA thing but back in 2001 when I bought it, that was only a "pretty bad" user interface.
I may have to get down to ordering state guides from AAA and spending a lot of time reading. I'll probably go ahead and install the 2001 copy of AAA Map 'N Go that I have; the tourist traps and such are probably about the same along most routes and it'd be a good starting point.
