In the pre-PC days, taking a trip across town, a state, or the country to visit someplace you’d never been before often involved planning worthy of a major expedition. You’d have to carefully check maps, trying to figure out the shortest and fastest routes, guessing when and where you’d need to stop for gas, scribbling down notes, and highlighting roads on paper maps.
That’s all changed with inexpensive and easy-to-use street navigation software. Just run a program on your PC and enter the address of your starting point and the final destination. Then, a few mouse clicks later, you’ve got both a map and exact turn-by-turn directions for how to get from Point A to Point B.
And as an added bonus, if you have a laptop and GPS receiver, you can take this software on the road with you, track your location in real-time, and get helpful hints in reaching your destination. (Most street navigation programs also have versions that run on PDAs for ultimate portability.) Several street navigation software packages are on the market that can keep you from getting lost. They all generally work the same, with the primary differences in the user interface and support of advanced features.
If you’ve never used a street navigation program before, this topic gets you moving in the right direction. I focus on DeLorme’s Street Atlas USA, showing you its basic features and how to use them.
Like other street navigation software, Street Atlas USA displays road maps of the United States, finds addresses, and creates routes between two or more points. Check out a few other program features that are important to know about.
POIs: All street navigation programs contain extensive databases of POIs. POIs refer to Points of Interest, not to Hawaiian side dishes made from taro root. POIs include restaurants (some of which might serve poi), hotels, parks, gas stations, and other locations you might be interested in while traveling. Street Atlas USA has a POI database that contains over four million businesses, services, and organizations.
Voice support: If you’re using a laptop and GPS receiver as part of a car navigation system, Street Atlas USA can give you voice instructions when you need to turn to reach your destination. You can also use a voice recognition feature to give Street Atlas USA commands instead of using a keyboard or mouse.
Routable roads: A big issue that all map companies face is ensuring that their road data is accurate, which can be very challenging considering the number of new roads that are built every year. Street Atlas USA has a feature that allows you to draw in roads that are missing on a map. After you create a road, Street Atlas USA can use it when calculating routes.
Customizable maps: Street Atlas USA has an extensive collection of drawing tools for customizing maps with symbols, shapes, and text annotations.
Street Atlas USA has many more features than I can cover in the space of this topic (such as measuring distances and trip planning that takes fuel consumption as well as the number of hours spent driving into consideration). To find out more about all the program’s features, visit www.delorme.com.
Street Atlas USA comes on two CD-ROMs: one with the installation program and files, and the other with map data files. By default, you need to insert the map data CD-ROM each time you use the program. If you have enough space, you can copy the map data files to your hard drive; see the online Help for instructions.
