Posted By Jung Fu-tzu on 12/17/2007 6:59 AM
I agree with Larry, the full laptop with Delorme or S&T's works best. Yeah, I have been using Delorme on a laptop on a stand in my Van for a few years now - and I only pull out a map occasionally when the street is spelled wrong on the assignment and I need to see similar names. The myopic thing you describe just isn't a problem when you are using a laptop. The left 1/2 of the screen is a wide angle view, the right half is zoomed in to see the street names. With older versions you would be reaching over to hit Pg up, Pg down to zoom in and out. (or Alt-Pg-up, Alt-Pg-down if the last thing you clicked on wasn't the map region). Delorme 2008 has "auto-zoom to turn" that zooms in when a turn is approaching so you can see the street names better, and backs out when you are on the open road, so you get more of the big picture. It isn't perfect, and sometimes I turn the feature off so I can control the zoom. The other thing about inserting stops - the best way to do it with Delorme is to set your start-finish as your house or office as a round trip. Then you insert your appointments as "stops" and you can put in as many as you want, and edit them through the day by clicking on the "advanced" tab. If someone cancels on you, you can drag and re-arrange the appointments, change the sequence anyway you want. It takes a while to get used to Delorme. You insert a stop - and it marks it on the map but the line where you typed it becomes empty (so you can type in another stop). So you type in several stops - but they are "gone". You have to click on the "advanced" tab to see those addresses or edit them. The interface takes a while to get used to, not very intuitive. Kind of like Xactimate, very powerful but kind of awkward. My only grief with Delorme, is that when you get to a site and want to "put the laptop to sleep" (close the cover and it will hibernate) it boots up quickly and Delorme is up and running - but the GPS usually stops working when the program is suspended like that. I used to go through all the tabs to "stop GPS" (the program thinks it is running, but it isn't - so you tell it to "stop"). Then you "start GPS" and get it to work again. I learned the shortcut keys (Ctrl-G) to start and stop, so I can get it working within about 2 minutes of getting back to the vehicle. And you always say "yes" when it wants to save the GPS log, otherwise it takes longer to find the satellites and get oriented when you start the GPS next time. In addition to a laptop stand, get one of those cable-locks for the laptop (loop it around the seat mount on the floor) and just toss a newspaper or something over the closed laptop on the stand so it doesn't look like a laptop when you park and leave. |