I just picked up the New Mexico series and I'm somewhat impressed but still have some complaints.
The Pros:
Finally some nice GPS software that has everything I need in one package. I don't have the energy to try to find maps online let alone figure out how to calibrate them. It's worth $99 to me to have someone do this for me.
The TOPOs are very nice compared to the Garmin software I was using on the PC and it's for the Mac.
There is a nice feature, the Elevation Profiles. This is very useful for me when I'm going to microwave path from our helicopter to the receive sight. I can easily tell if the signal was marginal because of terrain blocking the shot, etc.
The Cons:
The ruler for measuring distances sucks. It doesn't snap to your way-points. This is the biggest thing I miss about the Garmin software, I do a lot of distance measuring with microwave paths. There are work arounds to measuring the distances but you have to create a new path then copy the way-points to it. It works but not as quick and what if you want to measure to a temporary point.
The hand tool is a 'Traveling Tool'. I don't care much for it since every other program that has a hand (or pan) tool I've used acts like Photoshop. With the Pan tool you click and the screen scrolls for you as long as you hold the button down. It's just a different feeling to me, don't like it.
The path tool is the same as the ruler so your stuck with no snap to way-point. There is an advantage to using the path tool in their form which is like drawing with a pencil if you were drawing out some hiking trails. For my use in line of sight paths this way doesn't help me. You can hold down shift to make the line straight but it's still weird in you have to press shift after you click then let go of shift before you unclick your next point.
This is all the things I've noticed so far. I haven't played with the program much and I haven't tried driving around with the GPS and have the map track my movement but the features are there in the preferences and menus. I would recommend the program. The gripes I have here I think are minor, the program does do what it says.
Here's a couple screen shots. I didn't post them as images because they're about 500k a piece. The zoomed pic is as far as you can zoom into the map. There isn't much street detail but I think they market this product for topo work, not city navigation. The second pic is a sample of paths. I put one straight one in there and one freehand drawn one. The blue path is the one imported from my GPS, the red ones are created in the TOPO program.
Brad
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