Software
Review of: |
 Ever
since my father, long ago, used a globe to explain the American Revolution
to me, I have loved geography and maps. Yet the only map software I had
purchased to date was Rand McNally’s “Trip Planner ‘97”. I have
found the Internet map sites, such as Mapquest
satisfactory for my occasional needs.
InfoUSA says of their software: “Streets USA is the easiest and most accurate way to create maps for any U.S. location! Portable and easy to use, Streets USA contains virtually every U.S. street, highway and road on this easy to use product. Streets USA contains 10 different levels of mapping detail and over half a million points of interest. And with Streets USA's unique label and draw features, you can map out your travel route, label landmarks along the way, and print your own custom-tailored map!” Installation was fairly uneventful. The program comes on two CD’s. The installation instructions say that it should start automatically when the CD is inserted in the drive. This will not happen because no “autorun.inf” file is included on the CD. So the user must run “setup.exe” which may be run from either the West or East CD’s. During or after installation the program may be easily configured to use two CD drives, which is great for the many folks who now have two drives available (with CD creation now a must-have capability). The installed files have a fairly small footprint on your hard drive — about 6 megabytes. The uninstall of the program also worked smoothly, with no residual StreetsUSA left in the registry that I could find. The program provides 10 resolutions:
The maps look a lot like the maps available on Mapquest, which I think is the program’s real competition. For example, using my DSL connection, Mapquest can give me a neighbor-hood map of “314 N. Doxtator, Rome NY” in 10 seconds. StreetsUSA returns nearly the same map in about 2 seconds, but the user must first select from several listed ranges of addresses, even though he has already entered the street number when setting up the search – a bit annoying. Including the zip code on the Mapquest search speeds it up to about 5 seconds, but doesn’t really speed up the StreetsUSA search. Speaking of zip codes, infoUSA missed a good opportunity by not providing the capability to find out the zip code given an address. There are many features that allow you to create a customized map including the capability to have a number of different types of establishments displayed on the map. This is a very extensive database, and could be helpful in planning a trip or selecting sites to see at your destination. If you are traveling with your laptop, it could be very helpful in finding a motel late at night, as the hotels are shown on the map, and the phone number as well as the address is provided. The program also provides some tools for adding your own text and graphics to the maps, and copying the map to the clipboard for editing in another graphic program. Although StreetsUSA does not provide the extensive route planning capability of a program like Rand McNally’s, it does allow the user to determine distances between points, as well as to highlight the route that is planned. Of course the most difficult challenge for a program like this is keeping this extensive database up to date. Several areas I was familiar with did not have recently added streets and roads. For example, the Stone Oak area of San Antonio is missing several streets that have been added within the past 5 years. Anderson Loop, which has been four-lanes in this area for at least 10 years, is shown as a two-lane highway. I sent two e-mails to the program vendors, infoUSA, to try to obtain
information concerning how they keep the streets database up-to-date. They
did not reply, so I can only observe that some of the data is badly out
of date. For example, Rosie’s Hacienda (shown in the wrong place) is listed,
even though they went out of business about three years ago, and County
Line Barbecue (also shown in the wrong place) moved to I-10 at least two
years ago. Because of this missing, erroneous and out- of-date information,
I am reluctant to recommend the program. I think that the Internet will
provide the mapping info that will satisfy most people, and if you really
need to have it with you, then I would recommend Rand McNally.
CDUSA, a division of infoUSA1020 East 1st Street Bryan Lilius recently joined the staff of Faith Presbyterian Church, 1307 Blanco Woods. Prior to that he was a software engineer for Litton here in San Antonio, developing scientific applications for the Air Force, mostly involved with the simulation of lasers and laser effects. Married for 35 years, he has two daughters, and eleven grandchildren. |