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Streets & Trips 2001
by By Terry Currier—NOCCC, tcurrier@aol.com - December 02, 2000 at 13:34:20:
Some things get better with age; cheese, wine, me (don’t ask my wife, trust me.) So, is it the same with Microsoft’s Streets & Trips? Well read on and see. I really liked the look of last years Street & Trips 2000. Microsoft had made the streets look just like streets rather than a line.Installation—Installation has an improvement; they now give you a choice of typical or complete. The typical takes about 150MB of space while a complete installation will take about 825MB. They still do not allow you to do a regional install, which would be a much better use of space resources. I installed the whole thing; at least with today’s hard drive there is more room. If you have the room, do the full install, it is MUCH faster. You can export sections of maps that you need to a handheld PC running Microsoft Windows CE operating system version 2.0 or Microsoft ActiveSync technology version 3.0 or later. With that, you can find a place, find an address, work with Pushpins, and show or hide points of interest on the map. It will work with a GPS unit if it supports NMEA 2.0 or higher.
Interface—The interface (toolbar setup and their use of them) is consistent with other Microsoft products. The first ten toolbar items are what you would find in Excel or Word. After that are icons for legend, find nearby places, routing and directions, and search the web, drawing tools, and distance scale. Below that is a browser-like function, which makes it easy to look around and get back quickly to your previous location. Next is the find window where you put in an address or place for it to look. The sliding bar zoom is next, and then the select tool to zoom in on a specific area. Then comes the hand for moving the map along. Last is the map style to choose either road map or terrain. With the terrain map style chosen, you will not see any difference, unless you zoom out. When you open a map the bar above the map gives you the option of clicking outward. For example looking at the streets in Costa Mesa the bar will say “California, United States, North America” I can click on one of them and it zooms out to there. I particularly like the overview map, because I can quickly change to different areas or cities.
Appearance—Microsoft is still using the same company for street information and appearance. The maps still look good, although you still cannot change the color configuration.. There is no real need, but some people like to change background color. I it would open or at least request if I want it to open at the last viewed map. I can save a map view but that is not as quick or handy. I would love the ability to save a map to the toolbar for quick viewing. You can, of course, do it with shortcuts to the saved map. The saved maps will take up about 190Kb of space.
Find (Search)—Search capabilities are very good. You can look up an address, or place, by clicking the Find button on the tool bar. In the Street Address field, type the number and street name of the place you want to locate. You can also look up by street intersection (i.e. Harbor & Merrimac in Costa Mesa). For a place, you can look up a city OR even a business such as a hotel or restaurant. Want to see how many Sizzlers there are in California? Go ahead, it works. Once it finds the address, it will zoom in and place a pushpin at the spot, which is just what I think it should do. The find window has a list of the searches it has done. It has the streets for all of the United States, Canada, and the main streets in Mexico. It does go down to street level in Mexico City. It has the whole world on the CD. You are getting an atlas with all the countries and main cities. How cool!
Marking or pushpins—This is where the Streets & Trips 2001 starts to fall down. It still allows you to put markers wherever you want and label them. You have your choice of markers, and can put notes on them. However, unless you save the map your marker is gone. Last years Streets & Trips had a pushpin explorer, which allowed you to look for past search/finds you had found. This was really handy. You could have one named home and have it repeat a search for that. They have an import feature to have it look up and mark anything you want.
Print—Printing is very good, but it still lacks a print preview. It makes good use of color, but a choice of styles would improve it if the user could change color. I, at least< would like to choose a white background to improve printing speed, and paper saturation. When printing you have a choice of map or directions (if you ask it to do so.) Streets & Trips will also put an overview map on the printout if you request it to do so. Newer options let it put each stop, day, or 100 miles on a separate page. You can even tell it to print on the fewest number of pages possible.
Panning—Panning is the moving around on the map, and I include in here the zooming features. The zoom feature needs work to make it more useful. Most of the time, it zooms in more than I wanted. A plus would be if you could double-click on an area and have it center the map on that spot.
Routing—Routing is very easy. You can choose by pointing or giving the starting and ending address. And also, the quickest, shortest, scenic, or preferred route. It will give you the distance, time and cost estimates for the trip. You can change the route or add a stop by dragging the route line and dropping it wherever you want. You can also go online to download the latest road construction if you want to avoid them. (It will only list the major construction projects)
Business—It has listings for over 409,000 restaurants, and 68,000 hotels. It can find the addresses and phone numbers for restaurants, hotels, car rental and repair, ATM machines and banks, post office, bowling alleys, nightclubs, movie theaters, recreation areas, shopping, and more. You can even have it only show certain types of restaurants, such as steak or fish. This is where the Streets & Trips 2001 also disappointed me. Streets & Trips used to have a rating of some hotels and restaurants from the ZAGAT SURVEY restaurant listings . They would also have comments from their feedback function. I even found my favorite Thai restaurant through it. The 2001 version no longer lists them. Clicking on a business now displays the name and address. On the bottom of the box, there is a hyperlink that you might expect it to take you to more information about the business. Instead it brings up help with a link to infousa.com. There they tell you to click on the logo to go to inforusa.com site and get information on credit reports, telemarketing, and directory assistance. In other words, it is an ad within Streets & Trips. With each of the top street mapping programs having all of the USA streets, Streets and Trips 2001 need to distinguish themselves as being better than the others—this is not the way.
License—Good, they still allow the user to make a second copy for his or her exclusive use on a portable computer. Put it on flyers as long as you have the copyright notice. It will not allow you to publish for commercial use, or on the Internet. This in a way is odd. They give you the option of exporting it to the web and save it to html format. They really did a great job of it, clicking on it is impressive. But why if you cannot post it?
Help—Very good help, but no instructional book if you wanted it. All the help is on the CD. I did call the MS help about the viewing of businesses and was on hold for 17 minutes.
Don’t get me wrong its still a great program. The street information, and search ability is top notch. Look around at store ads and send in your rebate and you can end up paying about $8 for it. However, if you have Streets & Trips 2000 and you don’t need to have the very latest street information, I would recommend you stick with last years.
Rating from 1-10 10 being the best.
• Installation 9
• Interface 8.5
• Appearance 8.5
• Find 9.5
• Printing 7.5
• Panning 9
• Marking 6
• Routing 9.5
• Business 6
• License 8
• Help 8
Good—Great looking maps, easy to use. Search capabilities are great. Routing is very good. Can now load everything on to the hard drive.Works with Windows 95 or later and Windows NT 4.0 or later.
Bad—Took out some of the best features, pushpin explorer, and ZAGAT Survey. Cannot install regions of the map to the hard disk.
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