Phil online

I got fed up with Street Atlas‘ user interface. I mean, I’ve always hated it, but I didn’t know how bad it could be until I tried it on a touchscreen. I considered getting their new version (which claims to be easier for in-car nav) but it looks like their two big features are these: bigger fonts, and one button is bigger. Whoop-tee-doo.

So I bought iGuidance. The whole issue for me is useability, right? It has to be able to navigate to somewhere easily using a touchscreen. And it has to be able to recalculate the route as I drive. And it has to have maps for the entire US. That’s about it, I guess. And it does all that.

Note: I haven’t had a chance to test it yet on the carputer, because I also had to buy a new GPS antenna for this software. iGuidance only works with NMEA-compatible GPS receivers. That means, it works with just about every receiver except my old Delorme Earthmate. I bought a new GPS “mouse” device (USB connected, with WAAS support) on eBay for $60 shipped, but it has yet to arrive.

iGuidance is really a port from Windows CE (Pocket PC). (It comes with a touchscreen version on the same CD.) So it’s designed from the ground up to run on a touchscreen. But it still has too much of that Pocket PC flavor. The toolbar buttons are too small and too few. (Why is there a GPS info button but not a Favorites button?) And it doesn’t appear that the toolbar can be customized. And when you generate map files on your hard drive, you are recommended to have at least a 64MB memory card.

The help file looks like someone took a half-hearted stab at porting it from the Pocket PC so it also referenced the Windows version. They seem to have given up halfway through, though. There are references to menus that don’t exist (Custom Hotkeys) and you are told to “tap X” instead of “Click the X button”.

And finally, there are some touchscreen limitations. On a Pocket PC you do have some hardware buttons, like the jog dial. On the Windows version of iGuidance, these map to real keyboard keys. And I don’t want to have a real keyboard in my car. So… what to do? I think I need to write a custom front-end for it. Maybe someone already has.

I also want more functionality, but it simply isn’t there. This is a Good Thing, because the problem with Street Atlas is that it has Too Much functionality and they couldn’t fit it in a nice GUI. But I miss it.

In another post I listed my simple requirements. iGuidance does it all except for waypoints. It does let me save waypoints, but it doesn’t show them to me on the map like its internal POIs. So much for scouting out geocaches, but otherwise it looks serviceable.

This sounds like a bad review. Maybe I’m a disappointed by the feature set, especially when compared to Street Atlas which costs half as much. But I think I’ll really like iGuidance when I get to use it.

This morning I had it route my drive in to work. It did a great job. In fact, I only recently discovered a backroad route to work that saves me about 8 minutes on average. iGuidance picked that exact route out for me. I was impressed.

It suggested I leave the neighborhood by the short route, but I don’t like that way. So I went the longer route. iGuidance immediately noticed where I was going and adjusted my planned route accordingly.

And it talks! iGuidance told me about every turn as I was approaching it in a friendly voice. It’s not a digitized sounding voice. I presume it’s recorded. (Street Atlas used the Microsoft text-to-speech engine, which is improving but still sounds like a robot in a garbage can. The nice thing about that is that it can read you street names. The bad thing about that is that it doesn’t know that “Dr.” is “Drive” and not “Doctor”, or that “Rd.” is pronounced “road” and not “erd”.)

I understand that it also lowers the volume on your MP3 playback when the voice comes on, but I didn’t try that yet. I can report that the voice is very loud and clear. It’s a big improvement over Street Atlas’ voice which I could barely hear above the laptop fans.

A nice touchscreen-friendly feature is that whenever it expects you to type in information, it presents an on-screen keyboard. This is a Key Feature for me (no pun intended). I hope it is still useable on the tiny touchscreen when I get it in the car.

Searching by street name is supposed to be an intelligent incremental search. As you type the first few letters of the street address, it shows possibilities in a list. Eventually you can just choose the street from the list and save taps. I have yet to try it myself.

I’ll post another review after I’ve gotten a chance to put the program through some real-world tests. I predict I’ll like it more then.

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 11th, 2004 at 3:39 pm and is filed under Carputer, Design, Progress. 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.