Thread: Some Destinator suggestions

Originally Posted by Lum

I use Destinator via CF a lot now, I'm pretty dependent on it to do my job in all honesty.

I have just gotten back from a trip to Plymouth, and can now think of a few things that would be worth adding, changing or fixing in Destinator.

- After starting CF, you cannot use the home button. You have to have it calculate a route elsewhere before the home button works properly

- Please add the ability to enter a destination by keying in Longitiude and Lattiude. If possible, can you support all 3 formats that are in common use, namely:
- - Degrees, Minutes, Seconds
- - Degrees only, but you can enter a fraction.
- - Garmin's dumb format, Degrees, Minutes and minutes can be fractional

- A "find intersection" feature. Enter two roads without street numbers and it will find the point where the roads cross. This will be hard to implement because it needs to take into account roundabouts and grade separated junctions

- Since normalising my MP3 collection using mp3gain as suggested in another thread, satnav woman is now notably louder than my MP3s. Basically this means that having set my music to a comfortable listening level, satnav woman makes my ears hurt. It would be better to dim the music than raise the volume of the announcer. Perhaps you could have two configuration options, one controlling how much the music is dimmed by and the other controlling the volume of satnav woman

- Would it be possible to configure the points at which it gives alerts. At many junctions on the routes I take, it gives me warnings at 500yards, 200yards and the junction itself. I'll be travelling at 70ish MPH so the 200 yard warning comes late simply because the 500yard warning is still playing. Basically I get the same direction 3 times with no pause at all between them. At other times I get 2 miles, 500yards and at the junction. This is great. Basically the 200yard warning is not necessary.

- The visual display of the upcoming junction is a great feature. Would it be possible to have this displayed regardless of what screen you're on within CF

- When on the nav screen itself, would it be possible to have the next junction instructions permanantly displayed somewhere along with a countdown of the distance / time before I actually need to do it.

- In the UK every junction on a motorway and some A road junctions have 100 yard markers counting down the distance until the junction actually starts. Destinator will typically start announcing that something is going to happen in 500 yards just as I pass the 300 yard marker. I think this is because the marker signs count down to the start of the sliproad, wheras destinator is basing it on the point where you can no-longer join the sliproad as there is now a brick wall separating what are now two separate roads. One of them today waited until about 50 yards past this point before deciding that this was the time for me to exit the motorway.

- Can we have the ability to load POIs and/or favourites from .ov2 (TomTom) files. This seems to be the defacto standard for sharing POI databases on the internet. Being able to do this would go some way to satisfying the demands for speed camera detection since the databases for these are generally .ov2s

- On the POI list, can we have an option to have it sorted by distance, and also to display the distance and direction. This would be very useful when, eg. looking for petrol stations. If you really want to be clever you could actually calculate routes to the POIs and display driving distance rather than straight line distance, possibly even weight the sort order depending on how much of a deviation from your current route it is.

- Can we have the information that is currently displayed in bars at the top and bottom of the screen moved to the side to result in a squarer map.

Ok, that's a lot more than I intended to write when starting that post. Sorry if it seems like I'm asking too much.

There are some good ideas. There are lots of improvements to the GPS in 1.7 including UI and engine changes. I will also take some of this into account, but most likely after 1.7...

david