In-car software for the mobile Psioneer
By Steve Litchfield, May 21st 1996
By Steve Litchfield, May 21st 1996
Nextbase's conversion of Autoroute Express from the PC to the Psion 3a is very well-known, despite its launch being delayed by 12 months during the takeover by Microsoft. Essentially it's a very, very good routefinder, covering all B roads and above across the whole of the UK. The developers had to drop a lot of the little extras the PC version sported, in order to squeeze it onto a Psion SSD, but the essential route-finding engine is all there. As you can see from the screen-shot, one of its major strengths is the ability to have either a full-screen map, a full-screen table of directions or a combination of the two.
One of the highest profile omissions from Autoroute Express was any kind of support for GPS units, it seemed almost criminal that such a good and detailed road navigating system couldn't also be used as a moving-map. Enter Mike Rudin with AutoGPS, a little bolt-on freeware utility which reads GPS signals and then drives Autoroute's map cursor appropriately. It also has its own built-in information screen, as shown below, including a useful mileometer.
The first question people ask me, as the author, when enquiring about Mapper-3a is "Is it like Autoroute?". My standard answer is that Autoroute is an excellent routefinder but little else, whereas Mapper-3a does everything except routefinding! Technically, it's a Geographical Information System (GIS), the idea being that the entire country is stored in digital form and then represented on screen at any degree of zoom you care to mention. Because the maps are all 'drawn' from digital data, any number of extra overlays (hotels, rivers, county boundaries, airfields, castles, that sort of thing) can be overlaid as required, to build up the information that you require on a certain journey or a certain area. You can also add your own places and overlays to the database, and look up things, like STD or post codes.
Plugging in a GPS to the Psion enables Mapper-3a to move up a gear, providing quite sophisticated moving map facilities.
Findit takes a very different approach from the other programs above. Whereas they provide a lot of information on a standalone Psion 3a and represent nearly everything graphically on-screen, Findit only works in conjunction with a GPS and provides a text-based interface. This isn't as boring as it sounds, though, as there are pretty arrows which swing round in real time to indicate directions and so forth. The program allows you to set a destination, which can be a town, a road junction etc, and
which you're then directed towards by means of a little arrow and a distance remaining indicator.
So far so simple, the power of the program is in the extra databases. As you journey along, the right hand side of the screen shows the four nearest instances of whichever database you've currently got selected and their directions and distances. Findit ships with four standard databases; towns, road junctions, filling stations and fast food joints.
One of Findit's main selling points is the packaged deal which Positioning Ltd offers. Although you can obviously get the software on its own, a typical package would involve the software plus a 'black-box' GPS (i.e. no fancy displays) plus the special car-cradle (pictured) and all necessary power and data leads.