Route Planning on a Mac?

[RichEdwards]

Bought a new I-Mac and I love it. However, it seems that Garmin's Mapsource program, which I have used on a PC for years, is not available for the Mac. They do provide "Road Trip" which is inferior to Mapsource. What do you Mac owners use for trip planning?

[OverMyHead]

You have a couple of options. You can use bootcamp to boot into some flavor of Windows and use Mapsource, but I'm a big fan of VMware Fusion on a Mac. I use it with an Windows XP image and Mapsource and it works great. Another big name in virtualization for the Mac is Parallels. I prefer VMware however, since I can run my VM images on a number of different host OSes.

 

I keep hoping RoadTrip will catch up to Mapsource. Maybe they will someday.

 

David

[wbrissette]

While the two programs are different. I don't find it any harder to plan using Road Trip than I do using Mapsource. Maybe a different approach will work for you. Here is how I plan my trips. Let's say I want to go from LA to NYC. I pick my start point, my end point, and let the software do the routing. Next, I figure out how many miles I want to do per day. That gives me an approximate area to start scouting for a town. Once I pick my destination for the day, I make a new route with the start and end point. Then I start looking at the route it picked for me. I simply spend time either dropping waypoints, or just dragging the route to the roads I want to take. Once day one is finished, I do the same for the rest of the trip.

 

If you really want to use Mapsource, I would recommend Fusion. Parallels was the first product to market, and while they have caught up again to VMware with their latest version of Parallels, I think VMware simply understands the virtualization environments better. BootCamp is a great free option (sans the Windows OS), but I don't like having to reboot my computer to use Windows when necessary.

 

Wayne

 

 

[RichEdwards]

Here's Garmin's response to my concern:

 

"Dear Richard Edwards,

Thank you for contacting Garmin International.

RoadTrip is essentially the Mac version of MapSource. It is not yet

quite as capable, but we do plan on enhancing RoadTrip in the future.

MapSource itself is not available for the Mac. I apologize for the

inconvenience!

With Best Regards,

Brandon P

Software Support Specialist"

 

So perhaps an improved RoadTrip will be coming soon. I hope so.

[wbrissette]

Rich:

 

What is it that you want RoadTrip to handle better? (other than search, which I admit blows on the RoadTrip compared to MapSource).

 

Wayne

[RichEdwards]

I've used RoadTrip once to test its capabilities. I planned a route from my place to my buddy Tim's in Tallahassee. The program did accept my waypoints but when transferred to my Zumo, it drew straight lines from waypoint to waypoint. I had to do a "re-calculate" to get my route back on actual roads. There are other things besides route planning that Mapsource does better and faster.

[tallman]

Rich,

If you wait until after dark to arrive, you won't have a problem finding us.

Just replaced the front porch light with a new energy inefficient one.