Route 66 Route USA 2004 (Mac)

by Route 66

Product Features

• Door-to-door route planning for the United States and Canada
• Over 7,300,000 miles of road; 4,000,000+ points of interest
• Over 6,500,000 streets; 75,000,000+ house numbers
• GPS-compatible; new up-to-date maps
• Multi-lingual user interface including Spanish

Product Details

• Shipping Weight: 11.2 ounces
• Shipping: Currently, item can be shipped only within the U.S. and to APO/FPO addresses. For APO/FPO shipments, please check with the manufacturer regarding warranty and support issues.
• ASIN: B00013MS7O
• Item model number: USA-EN-3311-MAC
• Date first available at Amazon.com: November 28, 2003
• Average Customer Review: 2.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (37 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #10,567 in Software (See Top 100 in Software)
  • #46 in Software > Education & Reference > Mapping
• Discontinued by manufacturer: Yes

Product Description

From the Manufacturer

Door-to-door route planning for the United States and Canada.

• Includes the street network of Canada
• Over 7,300,000 miles of road
• Over 6,500,000 streets
• Over 4,000,000 points of interest
• Over 75,000,000 house numbers
• GPS-compatible
• New up-to-date maps
• Multi-lingual user interface including Spanish

Product Description

Route USA 2004 is a powerful mapping tool that gets you where you're going, anywhere in North America. This complete set of cartographic tools covers million of roads, streets addresses & points of interest -- for better & easier traveling. Multilingual interface for directions in more than just English

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

35 of 35 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Solid 1st Try, But Improvements Would Be Welcome, January 4, 2004

By 

Gary Mack (Shingle Springs, CA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Route 66 Route USA 2004 (Mac) (CD-ROM)

As much as I want to highly recommend this software, I can't. After running the install (which took way to long for 3 CDs) and applying the latest update (3.6.0.3) I ran the software on my 1.33 Ghz 17" Powerbook with 1 Gb RAM; and it was slow. For some reason this application is slow in redrawing a window that is being resized; I'm talking a 1-2 second lag sometimes in the refresh when you resize or scroll a window. Overall performance is somewhat sluggish as well.

The GPS I have (TN200) was recognized and works fine.

Unfortunately overall usability could be better.

If you think about it, street-mapping software with a GPS is intended to be run on a laptop (duh) so you can track where you are and have the software assist in navigation. I have the fasted Powerbook currently shipping, loaded with RAM, and the software performance is tolerable (I suppose I could use a Dual G5 and get better performance but I haven't figured out how to attach a 2,500 mile extension cord to my car...maybe a small Honda generator).

I can get maps and routes faster and in a more usable format from MapQuest when I'm at home. Unless the performance of the software is improved this will only be usable on the fastest Macs.

In addition, the routes that are generated are not very usable. For example, I generated a map and route from where I live in Shingle Springs (CA) to Walnut Creek (CA) where I catch BART (local subway system) to go to the San Francisco MacWorld Expo, a trip I make every January. The software generated a very interesting route. I generally drive down US 50 to US 80 to US 680. The software sent me on the exact same path but it reported a very different looking street route. It seems that every time there's an overlap on a freeway of two highways (i.e. a local highway and a state/fed highway that share the same pavement) the software shows that as a route change. Using the above example here is what I got: US 50 to El Dorado Freeway to US 50 to Capital City Freeway to I80 Business Loop to US 50 to W Sacramento Freeway to Highway 113 to Highway 12 to US 680 to Luther E Gibson Freeway. That is technically correct but confusing as h*ll. Each of these "segments" are reported with their own distances and it looks like you're merging and changing freeways all the time. If I had never driven this route before I'd be in trouble looking for all these route changes when in fact there are only 2 (50 to 80 to 680). The rest are all those nice little signs you seen on the side of the road (not navigation signs but memorial signs) that say things like "Luther E Gibson" freeway, which is really 680.

If there is a way via preferences to change this behavior I haven't found it (see P.S.).

So, the software seems to slow to run effectively on many current Mac laptops and it gives very strange driving routes (the maps look fine), which doesn't make for very a useful product. Technically it does work, but come on!

And I haven't even talked about how it works or features it should have (like the ability to speak these routes as you travel with your GPS attached).

I am very glad that someone is producing map/street route software for the Mac and the Route 66 people should be congratulated for entering the Mac market space. But there is plenty of room for improvement with this software. I look forward to the next version!

I gave them an extra star for entering the Mac market...

P.S.

I did find that you can turn on "Concise route descriptions" which helps a great deal in removing the confusing route information. It still shows the local highways as the main route but the State and US markings are displayed as well. Also, the longer I've used the software, the faster the screen refresh seems to be. It may have to do with it loading maps from disk and once they are cached things speed up. Once I get used to how this application works it might be more usable than I first thought. I'll try and post an update after I've used it for a couple of weeks.

32 of 32 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Mediocre, but what choice is there, December 29, 2003

By 

Svend (Seattle, WA USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: Route 66 Route USA 2004 (Mac) (CD-ROM)

After reading all the negative reviews, I almost returned my copy without opening it, but I'm glad I didn't. If there was some better software out there it would be a different situation. In it's limited form it's still quite useful.

It took me a while to figure out the backwards interface, and there's not even any real documentation. It did crash on me when trying to print a turn-by-turn route, but I went to their website and installed the latest software update, and that fixed it. Its redraw speed is fine on my G4 powerbook, and it doesn't crash when zooming in like others have said. The redraw problems others have complained about only happen when your display is set to thousands instead of millions of colors.

I haven't been successful in using my Garmin Vista GPS with this software. I set it to NMEA mode, like it said, and it can see the Vista, but it just says waiting for information, even though the GPS has a satellite lock.

Another problem is that the points-of-interest are very hit and miss. In the Seattle area, it's missing a lot of big retailers who have been at the same location for a lot longer than the map data is old. It doesn't see Costco, IKEA, Safeway, or Albertsons, except but a few locations.

For the price, I think it's near or better the quality of similarly-priced shareware apps, but it's not quite commercial-grade quality yet. Hopefully they'll improve this with free updates, downloadable from their website. Your only other street-mapping option on Mac OS X is to run a Windows version inside Virtual PC, which I'm not about to do.

14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Great Product With Some Need For Improvements, March 8, 2004

By 

Craig Benting (Milpitas, CA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Route 66 Route USA 2004 (Mac) (CD-ROM)

This product isn't perfect, but it's quite good considering this is the first time I've seen it and could not find any mapping software for OS X a year ago.

The interface is a little strange, but once you get used to it, it seems fine.

The detail of the maps seems very good, although some out-of-the-way small towns (with a few hundred people) may have little to no detail. It did, however, find two addresses that Yahoo Maps and MS Streets had no record of, which I thought was impressive.

One thing that most mapping software is horrible at is printing options -- the options for Route 66 I thought were very good.

The redraw speed while *scrolling* (not zooming in/out) was a little slow and could probably be easily fixed with an update that cached surrounding map details better. No matter how much detail I had turned on or what my zoom level was, it never took more than 1.5 seconds to redraw while scrolling. This may depend on how fast your computer is and how much memory you have -- I have 1.1gb of RAM and Route 66 was using 212mb according to "top" (command line resource reporter).

The GPS compatibility is nice, but haven't tried it yet -- I need to find a USB cable for my eMap GPS.

This software is very much worth supporting since I know of no other mapping software for the Mac currently and this software costs $35-$40. In my opinion, it's worth every penny of the $40 I paid for it.