maltfillisch's Full Review: DeLorme Street Atlas USA 2003 Full Version for PC ...
Mapping software is important to me. I am self-employed and make my living by finding and verifying the addresses of businesses. I started using DeLorme software 4 years ago and DeLorme is my current choice of mapping software. All of your makes ( the different manufacturers ) of mapping software are an improvement over consulting a bound paper Rand and MacNally street atlas. However, all of the makes of mapping software have their limitations. DeLorme makes more of a claim than the other major manufacturers about what it's software can do. For the most part it is justified. I'm happy with it's route finding options. However, I am resigned to it's address finding routine. Address finding accuracy over time has remained the same over the last 4 years. Nine times out of ten it can find a specific address. The other one time out of ten it either cannot find the address or it gives you an innaccurate location. On another count, the GPS tracking options are near intuitive and easy to learn. The first time I used a GPS with the software I simply plugged my GPS in to the serial port on my notebook and clicked on "GPS" in the software tool bar. After 30 seconds of clicking around I had installed the GPS, got it recognized and was importing a signal for the route tracking option.
Although DeLorme is more usefull than not, it needs improvement on two counts. It has got to increase it's accuracy of address finding. A static level of accuracy over a 4 year span of time is not acceptable. The other point that annoys is the choice of address finding process. You have the choice of asking for a specific street address without zip code, or a general zip code search. If you search a specific street address, that will be found by plowing through all the zip codes located in the municipality. When I searched an address for Baltimore the little icon for search in progress popped up and told me that it was going through all 66 zip codes for Baltimore. The five boroughs of NYC have in excess of 250 zip codes and it takes forever to do an address search for New York ! The simple addition of designating a zip code in your specific street address search would speed things up tremendously.
DeLorme is not the only mapping software that I have used. Because I use Garmin GPSs, I had a friend throw a copy of Garmin's Map Source software on my computer. The Garmin software is incrementally more accurate, but significantly more expensive. Address finding is a bit quicker, however the software is noticeably less user friendly to learn and use. All in all, DeLorme is a best buy. It is reasonably priced, more user friendly and usually accurate enough.
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