Bugbyte

I just downloaded the trial of Routebuddy. It now has turn by turn route navigation with voice and I thought, well, okay...maybe now is the time to buy. I'll try it out to see if it works on my old PPC Mini.

Maybe it's just me....probably is....but the interface is the most difficult to use that I've ever encountered. Here's the problem - it's based on the fact that you A) know where you are; B) know where you want to go. Here's what I mean:

Say you just landed at the airport and need to meet a friend at 811 Calle Saragosa Street in Santa Fe, NM. You've never been to the city and you have no idea where the airport is in relation to your destination.

To get Route Buddy to generate the route, you can't simply type in the starting and ending address. They have this point and click interface where you define where you want to start and where you want end by clicking on the screen with the mouse. Problem is, you don't know either piece of information.

First, you have to locate the airport using a search (PERHAPS if you have a GPS this shows up automatically, but I haven't tested it outdoors yet). Now, you would think you could right-click and choose "set as start point" somewhere. Nope. You have to either memorize where on the map this is, OR store it as place along the left side. Which, by the way, I dislike but I think that's a personal preference about Leopard in general. It works for iTunes but I don't like the construct for much else.

Even if you memorize where the airport is, you need to know the destination. Now you use the search tool to find it and again, either memorize it, switch to route mode, select start, select finish and finally route.

Here's something that would help a lot more:
1. Click on Search mode
2. Type in address
3. When found, drop down appears next to address you typed that says "Make Start, Make Finish, Make Waypoint"
4. Click on Navigate and go.

I drew a picture to show what I mean.

Not to mention that when you click "Route" it ought to give you the same type of interface you get when hit "Search" but with a spot to type both the start and end address with the default start being your GPS location.

In addition, the Filter window on the upper right has the same icon as the "Search" does on the toolbar. I typed the address I was searching for a couple of times before realizing its some kind of filter thing which ought to have an icon on the toolbar like everything else and work exactly like the Search interface does.

I'm just sick about it. I know these guys are trying really hard to make a good Mac Nav product but I'm really hating it. Nav software shouldn't require reading the instructions and 15 minutes of dicking around to realize how hard it is to use.

Considering that Route buddy plus maps costs more than Leopard, this would be one of the most expensive pieces of software I would own. I just can't justify that for something I am repelled by.

Is it just me?

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Jirka Jirout

Yeah, I use Routebuddy to visualize logs from my cars and to prepare materials and print maps for our navigation competitions, but the interface for geocoding and routing is kind of weird.


Yes, the current position shows automatically and it is quite reliable.

Another thing is the speed of routing. TomTom Go, which is much less powerful hardware is many times faster when planning a route (same route, same maps installed). I admit we have the same problem with QCar navigation module.

Bugbyte

One way I noticed that Tom-Tom Go is able to trim down the entry process is by requiring you to enter State, then city, then street and it guesses pretty quickly about both the start and end points. By starting wide and getting narrower and narrower, it can usually pinpoint the street pretty quickly without you having to enter the whole thing.

As far as the actual speed of generating the routing, if it takes a minute or two, I don't really mind. If it took 5 minutes, well...that would be different. Even if it solved part of the route first, and then the rest took another minute or two, that would be okay.

I've done some route logic coding in the past, so I understand the possibilities can chew up a lot of processing time.

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Jirka Jirout

Yep, we use the same approach. On the other hand, RB's approach with parsing natural language address makes more sense for a computer with a keyboard. It is faster to type "Philadelphia, PA" than to select "PA" from a combo or even type this into a text field and then to move to next one.


I have not tried a long route with Routebuddy, but in QCar, a 300-400km route takes about a minute. TomTom does it in under 20 seconds. That we cannot beat it even on a Core 2 Duo 2GHz computer is simply a disgrace for us ;-)


In our software, the main bottleneck is the map storage. 80% of time during the route caclulation is taken by retrieving the road network data, only 20% is the path searching calcultion as such (we use A*). We can reduce the time by tweaking the heuristic estimate function, but then we get routes that are far from optimal.