Opalescence

I’m about to go running around the city on errands and such, and since I’m still re-learning where the main thoroughfares and good routes are, I’ve been using mapping programs such as Yahoo Maps, Google Maps, and Rand McNally to find any businesses and locations good enough to give me their addresses (you’d be surprised who sometimes doesn’t do this).  In doing so, I’ve noticed a few things about mapping software.

All the gripes about these programs aside, we still use them if they’re onhand.  They’re convenient, even when they’re not.  I’ve been misled, lied to and otherwise bamboozled by Yahoo Maps (powered by "Trapquest"!), though I still use it out of habit sometimes.  Google Maps is nice from what I’ve seen, but I rarely use it because it’s not tied to Yahoo, where I often check email and Groups postings.  Rand McNally, which to my knowledge seems to have been making maps forever, has actually corrected many of the mistakes I’ve seen in Trapquest.  Their mapping program looks highly reliable so far, though I rarely use it aside from finding big errors in Yahoo.

I’m also becoming aware of a feature that I’d really like to see in mapping software, but have not witnessed anywhere thus far.  Usually when I go out running errands, I need to go to several points in a city.  I can type in addresses indivdually, but have to map each one from either home or where I think I’ll be when I go there.  This can be very cumbersome and time-consuming, not to mention more than a little frustrating.

What I’d really like to see on these programs in the near future (like, yesterday) is a plotting feature that allows you to store several addresses and plot them from one to the other, more or less simultaneously, so you can figure out your overall flight path for the day.  I’ve done a little exploring on the three programs I’ve mentioned, and haven’t yet found a feature I can use to this effect.  I’m thinking that, with people’s lives sometimes taking them all over the place, this would be a useful  and fairly popular feature for mapping software.

Of course, I’m not above the idea that I just haven’t found out how to do this yet with the existing programs.  But if anyone has any ideas (how to use the existing programs like this, or any new software that can easily do this), please feel free to let me know.

Until then, I’ll continue re-acquainting myself with Houston…

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