New Mapping Software Has Its Potholes

One of the latest fads in personal computing is mapping software for travelers and others who need help getting where they are going.

These programs take advantage of the computer’s ability to quickly wade through mountains of data. But performance suffers when you have a slow microprocessor, limited disk storage space or want to shift focus quickly from one map to another.

Airline travelers who need to find the locations of hotels or restaurants, or who need other information about unfamiliar cities, may find two programs helpful: Local Expert ($99) from Strategic Mapping Inc. and Zagat-Axxis CityGuide ($99) from Axxis Software Inc.

Highway travelers who want to plan their routes are the target audience of Automap for Windows ($100) from Automap Inc. and Key Map ($60) from SoftKey Software Products Inc.

People who need to find addresses virtually anywhere in the nation can use a CD-ROM program called Street Atlas USA ($149). If they want to print the maps, MapExpert ($495) is the one to use. Both are published by DeLorme Mapping.

Strategic Mapping’s Local Expert is the only Macintosh program among the group, and the company says it will soon introduce a Windows version for IBM-compatible computers. You get one set of map and guidebook data free for the city of your choice with Local Expert. Additional cities are $25 each. Monthly updates of guidebook data, each good for the ensuing three months, are available by modem for $15 each. For now, you can purchase maps and guidebook-type information for 25 major U.S., eight European and two Asian cities.

The maps show adequate detail for getting around downtowns, shopping districts and main business areas. But there is no street detail for residential areas. The guidebook data contains about 140 categories and is based on information used by travel agents.

Zagat-Axxis CityGuide, a Windows program, is available only for Los Angeles, Chicago and New York ($249 for all three), and it focuses only on restaurants and hotels. But its maps are more detailed than Local Expert, and it can locate business and residential addresses on the map.

If you have to visit an unfamiliar office in one of the three cities, CityGuide can pinpoint your destination on the map as well as the exact location of hotels and restaurants so you can quickly see their proximity. Local Expert can map the ZIP code you’re going to but cannot pinpoint the address. Most of its hotels and restaurants will be accurately placed, but it’s up to you to read the map and figure out exactly where you’ll be.

The CityGuide data contains ratings and reviews from Zagat Restaurant and Hotel surveys. Places of interest are shown on the maps, but detailed information about them is not included.

CityGuide also has a method of finding routes from one address to another. But the results I got for Los Angeles were bizarre, despite tuning it for my desired mix of freeways and surface streets. It is also slow.

For highway travelers, however, route finding is excellent with Automap for Windows ($100), which covers the United States, Canada and northern Mexico.

Performance on a 25-megahertz, 386-equipped PC was snappy. For instance, the route for a 2,400-mile cross-country trip was computed in about 10 seconds, complete with a detailed list of directions that included driving times for each leg. You can set the program to calculate times based on the speeds you typically drive. You can also control whether it seeks the freeway route or meanders along two-lane highways.

But there’s room to improve Automap. It won’t locate addresses within a city. You can’t easily save a route for later recall, and navigating through the mixture of pull-down menus and tool icons is confusing. Maps can get very cluttered on the screen, and it’s not easy to clean them up.

Key Map is not a Windows program and is less polished than Automap. Its route-finding feature runs slower, elapsed time for the journey isn’t calculated, and there is little ability to set route preferences. But it finds routes and distances.

You can save routes with Key Map and call them back later. Companion city maps are also available for $60 each. But I thought the performance of the Los Angeles map was too slow to be useful. Finding and mapping an address typically took five minutes.

If you have Windows and a CD-ROM drive, MapExpert or Street Atlas USA lets you find virtually every street in about 300 cities nationwide, plus thoroughfares and highways anywhere in the country.

MapExpert can print detailed maps ranging from a single page to a wall-size mural, which is automatically printed in page-size sections.

As an electronic map, it takes a minute or two to pinpoint a block anywhere in the country. The fastest way is to zoom in on a ZIP code. The program will find the street and block from there. It won’t find the actual address on the block, however, so you can’t tell which side of the street a location will be.

Street Atlas USA has the same mapping database but lacks the printing and map annotation ability. Since it is a Windows program, however, you can copy a map image into another Windows program and print and annotate it there. It would be very difficult to create a wall map that way, however.