Customer Reviews

Street Atlas USA 2003

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(6)
1 star:		(23)

 

 

This was a tough one. I saw all the awful reviews and wondered, should I even bother with this product? So I bought it, and a few days later I'm still not sure I like it, but it is functional. I find myself using both the new and the old side by side. SA 2003 is both good and bad.

Pluses:

The map data is better. However, it's not perfect. Even the latest data Delorme has still isn't up to where local street maps are. However, there is a "fix." This version of Street Atlas allows you to add the roads. (It's not hard with a GPS log to generate a fairly accurate representation of the road.) So you can fill in the gaps with a little driving around.

The addition of points of interest, restaurants, hospitals, and radio stations directly to the map is neat. The data is mostly accurate and somewhat helpful even if only moderately complete.

There is a lot more functionality in SA 2003. You can have multiple routes, multiple layers of draw objects, multiple waypoint files, (all at once) and it makes usage rather complicated. It's almost like AutoCAD in the layers respect. It's going to send many users into overload - almost guaranteed. If you liked the overall simplicity of the previous versions, you're going to hate this one. There should probably be an hour DVD showing how to make best use to the program included in the packaging.

There are a lot of search options. The ability to find places within a window, city, by name, zip code, lat/lon, etc. is great. Unfortunately, the options combined with the "new" interface makes it a little too cumbersome for most people.

Reliability is good. It hasn't crashed yet.

Minuses:

The interface is awful. (I'm still on the fence as to how awful it is. Half of me hates it and the other half is starting to tolerate it.) It's non-standard and somewhat non-intuitive. You should read all the help files TWICE before realistically trying to use the program, especially if you've used a previous version of Street Atlas. Whoever wrote the UI forgot the cardinal rule of Windows programming, a familiar interface improves the user experience.

I've read the reviews about it being slow. It's not as fast as previous versions, but it's far from being arduously slow. Be sure to copy the data files to the hard drive. (Stick Data CD in and run setup from that CD.) It improves speed. The killer is the GPS. Do not turn on the GPS for tracking or real time locating unless you're not doing anything else with the computer - my 1.2 Ghz Athlon w/ 512 MB of RAM was maxxed out (100% CPU utilization) trying this task. (Unclick every check box in the GPS Options dialog area.) You will likely be disappointed if this is your primary mapping program in your car if nothing else, due to the excess CPU utilization, it may feel very sluggish. However, in normal home usage, locating places and scrolling through maps without GPS, CPU usage rarely topped 50% and usually stayed below 10%. Once you have a route and everything else setup where you won't be interacting with the computer, then you can initialize and run the GPS and not be too annoyed. (Just don't try to make changes at this point.) I'm not exactly sure why this occurs, but careful use of accepting GPS data seems to solve most problems.

I did not test the microphone portion where you can ask it where you are. So I cannot "speak" to how well that works.

Verdict: The program has an awful, "new" interface, good information with lots of flexibility, and is fine speed-wise as long as you're not using it for real-time mapping with a GPS while typing a letter. And if you're a technophobe - you're going to hate it because it's non-standard and there will be somewhat of a learning curve. If you're planning to be sitting in your car with your laptop and GPS, you may be happier with something less CPU intensive and simpler, like an older version of Street Atlas. However, if you're the adventuresome type whose not afraid of screwy non-standard interfaces - check out SA 2003. It offers a lot.

I would not recommend Street Atlas USA 2003, even though in the past, I have been a big fan of Street Atlas. No longer with the Deluxe versions now being the only option for 2003 and forward. Let me explain. First of all they took what was in my opinion one of the best interfaces of any product I have used and made it one of the worst. Common windows menu's are a thing of the past. Even the graphical represenation of streets is of lower quality then the Street Atlas version 8 I had used in the past, which i will now be going back to. The past version was just a joy to use, the new one makes you wonder what their software engineers were thinking. If your a fan of the older Street Atlas versions (windows interfaced) I think you will be very disappointed with the new lower pane navigation method. I will be taking advantage of my Delorme 30 day money back guarantee and re-installing my Street Atlas 8. I also believe Street Atlas 9 is the last version of the software with the windows interface. What a shame!

We have been users of Street Atlas since SA2, and find that overall, versions up through SA9 perform efficiently, effectively and with a high value of user functionality. However, for us, SA2003 does not meet our expectations, nor does it perform with the same speed and ease of use that SA9 does.

The performance is degraded substantially from SA9. While SA9 is very quick to zoom in/out, pan, ascertain routes etc, SA2003 is very noticeably slower. In fact, it takes many seconds to zoom in/out. Opening up SA9 on all four machines took (roughly) 25% of the time it took to open up SA2003. For instance, on the Toshiba Satellite 1.7Ghz machine, SA9 took 4 seconds to open up a map file with a magnification of 11. That same machine took 14 seconds to open up SA2003, centered in the same area, with the same magnification.

I cannot find what the value of the 'Magnify' function. If we use the 'Zoom' feature, why add a 'Magnify' function? This seems redundant.

Although my screens are typically 1400x1000 (and 1024x768 up to 1600x1200), I would like more real estate for the SA screen. Why can't I move or remove the right hand menu bar? I have no need to see the world map to pan, lat/long, compass nor magnification features.

Additionally, I didn't notice any "F" key equivalents in SA2003 that was associated with certain functions on SA9. For instance, F4 (Phone), F5 (zip) and F6 (place) on SA9 does nothing on SA2003. And, F7 (Locate by address), F9 (Map legend), F10 (draw objects), F11 (route) and F12 (Initializes GPS) on SA9 does not appear to have any function in SA2003.

Is there a way to revert the user interface on SA2003 back to the interface displayed in SA9? I find that it is very hard to navigate around the menus on the bottom of the display. In fact, there does not appear to be a 'file'/'open' function. Apparently the designers have through to use their own proprietary interface which does not in the least match up with standard Windows interface.

The new colors in SA2003 are extremely hard to read. For instance, when mouse-over a particular street, either the default or mobile colors produce a near-unreadable street value in the lower left-hand corner. They were very readable in SA9.

The forestry color (green) in SA9 does not appear in SA2003. Is there a way to 'turn on' the coloring again? Specifically, National Forests in SA9 was colored green. SA2003 does not color, nor in any other way, mark the boundaries of the national Forest. The same holds true for city zones.

The low definition and detail of roads on higher magnifications on SA2003 make it near-impossible to use at these higher levels of scan. In other words, on SA9, a zoom-value (for example) of 11 produces much more screen and street data on SA9 than the same zoom-value on SA2003. And yes, the screen resolutions are identical (same area of coverage on both programs).

Did you know that for screen resolutions of 800x600, 1024x768 and 1400x1050, the Microsoft Office Bar (top right corner) [Screen] OVERWRITES the "HELP" button on SA2003? Only after many days of program experimentation, and shrinking the program window, did I find that there are other options in the "HELP" button (IE FAQ) besides F1 (basic help). I realize that the office bar is not in vogue these days, but honestly, why author a program to 'cover' a historical program option (office bar)? Does that mean that people who continue to use the 'on-top' version of the office bar must now be mandated to switch to an 'active desktop' for their quick icon selections, or turn off the always-on-top feature of the office bar?

I'm not sure why the total package was changed - perhaps it would have been very beneficial to conduct a market survey as to what the users wanted. In my situation, I would have *REALLY* preferred options to revert several key components back to SA9 functionality.

Once again, we're really disappointed, and wish that we did not have to return the product. However, to us, given the fact that Delorme is the leader in mapping software, and that we are fully satisfied with SA9, we will continue to use the earlier version of that product.

Changed the interface, Map on screen less visible, slowed the program down, printout less controllable, automatically puts an address on map.

And with all that... data is no more current than version 9 from what *I'm* able to see.

NOT as good as it was, I'll be returning the software, and going back using v.4 and v.8 until I find something better, or delorme puts the old interface back.

I owned a previous version of this software, switched to Microsoft Streets & Trips 2001. When it came time to update Streets & Trips, I looked at the competitors, Delorme included. After a side-by-side comparison, it seemed like Street Atlas USA 2003 was the way to go. Boy, was I wrong.

The user interface is absolutely horrible, to the point of being nearly unusable. Nothing is intuitive. I keep finding myself going for the non-existant menu items in the non-existant menubar at the top of the window.

The graphics are ugly. One thing about the Microsoft product is that the maps are generally accurate and look nice. Delorme's maps are little better than stick drawings. Road names are sparse and usually not aligned well with the associated road.

The map data is innacurate. A 2-year-old version of Streets and Trips finds my house correctly while Street Atlas USA 2003 with its "Extensively Updated Data" places my house several blocks down the street and misplaces established resorts and landmarks.

This product is a waste of money and time. Go for Microsoft Streets and Trips 2003.

Having been a Street Atlas USA customer since version 3, I was pretty committed to trying to like this. In addition, I own the Delorme Earthmate GPS which only works with Delorme products so I was REALLY committed. I tried... and I tried...

Well... I'll be looking to replace the whole package. They ruined the Street Atlas franchise with this release. the user interface is awful, the features are now harder to use (if they still exist at all) and the program is slower. And the whole reason I bought it was because I thought the streets would be updated, but not in the areas that I was looking for!

How does a company release an "Update" by removing features and making it worse???
The one saving grace is that Delorme has a 30 day refund policy which I definately will be using.

Oh... did I mention that I'm STILL waiting for them to respond to my email to the support department....
If anyone has any recommendations for a good GPS/Mapping package, please post.

I have owned multiple version of Street Atlas by Delorme, and many of their other products. Street Altas 2003 is a big step backward. They are attempting to merge the 3-D Topo Map program format into Street Atlas and failed on first pass. The maps are not attractive to the eye, the scanning and zooming is much slower, and the controls clumsier. The points of interest are hard to find, uni-dimensional by class of point of interest, the drawing of the route to the point of interest is full of errors, and locating the point of interest once selected is difficult. In earlier versions, the points of interest were located easily by icons and rapidly explained with a right click or pointing, to include the point of interest phone number. The routing program is goofy, and missing the "stick to interstate" feature, resulting in bizarre routing on slow, back roads. Delorme, you bombed on this one and I want my money back.

If you are looking for door-to-door routing software that doesn't require you to be online, then Street Atlas 2003 (SA2003) is for you. It handles routing quickly and accurately and the road database is extensive. But, if you are looking for travel planning software to plan a vacation or to replace AAA Map'n'Go (the vacation planner that Delorme has discontinued), then you will be very disappointed.

SA2003 adopted the non-standard user interface that Delorme already uses with TopoUSA. While it does eliminate dialog boxes appearing over the map display, it takes quite a while to find your way around and seems limited in scope. The navigation bar at the right of the screen takes more screen area than it needs to.

To route door-to-door, you can enter a starting point either by entering an address or by clicking on the map. You can enter stops along the way and designate the final destination. The calculated route can be printed out as turn-by-turn written directions and various maps, including strip maps and turn-by-turn maps. Only major highways are shown in color, making the maps harder to follow than Map'n'Go's. The turn-by-turn maps result in lot of duplication because many intersections, particularly Interstate interchanges, are treated as a series of separate turns so you get four or five identical turn-by-turn maps each with directions for a tiny portion of the intersection.

If you want to plan a vacation, SA2003 fails miserably compared to the discontinued Map'n'Go. Delorme's Map'n'Go contained essentially the entire AAA Tourbook database of tourist attractions and accommodations, each with several paragraphs of detailed information, including address, phone, description, hours of operation, how long to allow for the visit, admission or rates and AAA ratings. Planning a vacation was a breeze and the program quickly calculated routes and provided excellent directions and maps. Though routing was from the nearest major street, instead of door-to-door, that was fine for vacation planning. You could ask Map'n'Go to show you all points-of-interest along a route and in seconds you would have a complete list, including a narrated slide show to watch. Not so with SA2003 which, sometimes after many minutes of processing, provides only the phone number (but no address) of each point-of-interest.

Where Map'n'Go nicely displayed accommodations and points-of-interest on the map, SA2003, because there are so many points, only shows tiny dots at all but the most zoomed-in maps. I used to use Map'n'Go to filter the lodging symbols to show only lodging at a certain price and AAA rating to quickly find the best price for a given quality level. With no lodging detail, you simply can't do this with SA2003. Other Map'n'Go features missing from SA2003 are routing for Canada and Mexico and downloadable road construction and weather information.

Unfortunately, SA2003 makes up for less points-of-interest quality with more quantity - over 4 million. Unless you want to know of every bar, nail salon, ATM, dance studio, car dealer, etc., you will find SA2003 to contain far too many points-of-interest, all with no detailed information for travel planning. You can limit searches to certain categories, but even that results in an overload. Searching for "Amusement and Recreation" within a 10 mile radius of San Francisco resulted in over 1,500 places, including every karate studio, night club, video arcade, bowling center, etc. For me, over 80% of the results were useless. You can further limit searches by using keywords, but even then you end up with excessive quantity with no detailed information. Unfortunately, I found many points-of-interest categorized wrong. For instance, the leasing office of an office building was listed as an amusement.

No matter how you intend to use SA2003, you will find its most glaring weakness is the time it takes to search for points-of-interest, particularly along a route. I set up a 1,500-mile route from San Francisco to Astoria, Oregon and searched for points-of-interest within 2 miles of the route. The search took twenty-five minutes! The majority of the resulting 2,284 points-of-interest were of no use to the vacation planner. Every along-the-route search test I tried took 15 to 30 minutes to run. Checking System Monitor showed the CPU running slammed at 100%. This was on an 800MHz PC with 256MB of RAM. I tried the same tests on a 733MHz PC with 384MB of RAM with similar results. These excessive search times make SA2003 extremely frustrating and impractical to use. Worse yet, if you don't print out the results or save them to a separate text file, you lose them when you exit SA2003.

Delorme could greatly enhance SA2003 for the vacation planner by changing the install program to allow the user to install only those point-of-interest categories that they want. For instance, I would only install accommodations, tourist attractions and a few others. That would result in a substantially smaller database, which (I hope) would greatly speed up searches. Delorme could further enhance SA2003 by making a special travel planning database available that contained the type of detailed AAA information that was available in Map'n'Go.

I do not use mapping software with a GPS so I did not check this feature with SA2003, though it did look comprehensive.

If Map'n'Go was still available, I would immediately return SA2003 and buy the latest Map'n'Go. For now, I will continue to use my 2001 version of Map'n'Go 7 for vacation planning and just use SA2003 to verify the routing. If another company comes up with a decent vacation planning package, I would drop Delorme as quickly as they dropped Map'n'Go! I hope a better solution comes along before the information in Map'n'Go becomes too outdated.

When I saw that the version number of the new Street Atlas had gone from "9" to "2003", I feared the worst.

Alas, I was correct. Delorme has migrated SA to their "new" user interface, a descendant of the unusably bad one inflicted upon us in Topo 3.0 (and which is only somewhat improved in Topo 4).

This interface is, umm, well, it [is bad]. The amount of non-intuitive "monkey motion" required to accomplish a simple task is easily double what the old familiar interface needs. To me this appears to be a whole bunch of mostly-unneeded new features, thrown together with an interface designed by a committee of engineers who have apparently never seen a Windows PC or a Mac.

Oh, and let's not forget the often-lousy map data and a lot of really laughable gaps in the routing data. I found instances where, for example, the routing cannot even follow a straight state highway, in the middle of a desert, for 20 miles without deciding to put you off on a dirt road. And the comment about roads still on the map when they've been abandoned for 50 years is right on. Doesn't anybody actually know where the real roads are in this country?

Yes, the old program was showing some limitations, but this could have been addressed without trashing all of the functionality and ease of use. This new version has truly seen the baby tossed out with the bath water. Whoever allowed this travesty onto the market should be fired.

I am still holding out hope that when a newer version of AAA Map'n'Go (which is based on the old SA program) comes out, it will retain the old interface. If, as I fear, it does not, then DeLorme will no longer have me as a customer.

Poorly Designed, Sluggish Interface

I purchased Street Atlas 2003 due to my disappointment with the point of interest data (and not the interface) of Microsoft Streets and Trips 2002. Unfortunately, the interface with Street Atlas 2003 is so poorly designed, it is almost unusable. While it looks like the point of interest data is in fact better than S&T 2002, the data in S&T 2003 is supposedly better. Street Atlas 2003 has one advantage over S&T in that the GPS has a 3 second update, not the foolish 15 second interval that Microsoft chose.

The specific problems with the interface can only be understood by using the product. However, basic functions such as panning and zooming can be a hassle. When searching for a specific address, it inexplicably scrolls through a list zip codes on a pop-up menu, apparently to show you what it is doing.

The POI data is quite extensive, almost to the extreme with categories and subcategories. However, when searching for a POI, the result is shown on the screen but it is not clear how to get the street address. Even in the menu below, it lists map coordinates and not a street address. Even the maps themselves are not as visually appealing as S&T.

Another problem is that, even on my 1.6 GHz Pentium IV, the program is slow to launch and slow to find addresses, and slow to calculate routes.

In short, the program needs a completely revamped interface.