My official BaseCamp Complaints

Well, after using BaseCamp for 2 days now, my verdict is it's just as bad as Google's mapper, but at least BaseCamps maps are harder to read than Google's.

Complaints so far, maybe someone has a solution for these, but i have yet to find them. If you know of a solution, please speak up. If your solution is use XYZ's utility, please, I'm not interested. I'm sick and tired of using 15 different apps to get something done and Garmin most certainly has the money to do this application right.

And Garmin, please note, I have been writing and designing software for over 20 years now. Yes, even some GIS apps are in my portfolio. I can assure you from bitter experience, that if a beginning user can't figure out how to do something almost immediately, then it's a poor design and you need to get your managers and developers out of the UI design process and replace them with qualified UX designers (developers make horrible UI designers, for the most part, there are exceptions). I know what I just paid for my 595. You can afford some good UX designers. Use the BMW money. But if your application and features aren't obvious to use, then you end up with users that are frustrated after a few hours and eventually, angry. Kinda like me.

Shape Waypoints:

If I drop a shape waypoint on a road, the app should be intelligent enough to figure out which lane i'm talking about. I wasted every bit of 3 hours trying to figure out why BaseCamp kept kicking me off the highway, only to realize, after it occurred to me to zoom all the way in, that the waypoint was dropped on the northbound lane of a south bound trip, So instead of BaseCamp intelligently realizing this and fixing it, it routed me off the highway, up 5 miles of back roads, to get back on the northbound side, to hit the waypoint marker, then routed me back onto the southbound lane. Yes, it insisted on making me do a loop so i could cross the shape waypoint because it was dropped on the northbound lane.
If I happen to drop a shape waypoint 6 feet off the road, the system should be intelligent enough to realize that i meant the road (and lane) and i really have no intention of coming to a 70 mph dead stop to make a right hand turn, over the guardrail, down the drainage ditch, high five a random tree, then back up the drainage ditch, over the guardrail again, make a right turn and grind down the highway. I shouldn't have to step thru the hundreds of shape waypoints in my route, one by one, to correct this error. It shouldn't have happened to begin with. If you are worried about the off road guys that may want to high five a random tree, fine, put a checkbox in the editor "I have no intention of going off road".
When building a route, if i designate that i do not want notified about a shape waypoint, then that shape waypoint should also disappear from the directions tab in the info box. In one case i had to drop 14 shape waypoints on a highway to get the damn thing to keep me on the highway. Now i can't tell how many miles i'm on that highway from the directions without a calculator because it keeps giving me the distances to each stupid waypoint. If i flag a waypoint as don't notify me, they should be removed from the turn by turn directions as well. Don't notify me means i don't care about it, i'm simply trying to beat BaseCamp into submission, i don't need reminded of that.

Routes:

I am an intelligent, middle aged guy that does like sitting on his porch with a cup of coffee looking at atlases to plan a trip. When I come to BaseCamp, odds are good I already know the route I want to take, I just want my GPS to follow the same route. In this day and age, with the level of technology available, the GIS databases available, and the AI systems available, there is absolutely no reason why you can't have a feature where I go to routes -> new route -> Manually Enter Route. Then a prompt comes up, and I simply type "Home to 51s to 70e to Breezewood, pa to 522s to Front Royal, va" and click Map It. Your systems should then be intelligent enough to realize, that's the route I want to take and fill in any gaps and create the stupid route. Once the initial route is created, I am free to shape it as i wish, but, overall, the route is done. I have wasted hours and hours over the past two days fighting with this thing and creating hundreds of shape points to keep the damn route on the road I want it on. Its ridiculous.
I may have come up with a solution for this, but I'm not sure yet. But on a typical route, I most likely will have multiple preferences for the whole route. Meaning I want to hammer drop to the Blue Ridge Parkway. Just get me there ASAP. But, once I'm on the BRP, stay on the BRP to North Carolina. From there, hammer drop to Nashville. Now I think I solved this one by creating a folder and instead of one route, split it into three and set the hammer drop sections of the route to Drive, but I have to play with it more.
Now I completely understand that Brain Dead Users (BDU's) are capable of doing some messed up things that prevent a system, like BaseCamp, from being technologically capable of drawing the route on the road. I get that. And in those situations, I agree with BaseCamps solution of drawing a straight line between the waypoints. We are on the same page all the way up to here. BUT. It would be nice if BaseCamp would tell me WHY it couldn't draw the section of the route. Is a shape point not on the road? Is there no practical way to get from point A to point B? I freely admit that I am often a BDU. And there's nothing wrong with that. I am more than willing to fix whatever error I have made in BaseCamp. But in order for me to fix it, BaseCamp has to tell me what I did wrong.
Most times, if BaseCamp resorts to a straight line, the solution is to grab one of the shape waypoints and move it ever so slightly. That redraws the route. Ok, that's fine. But why didn't the Recalculate Route button do that?

0 SCPhantm over 7 years ago

Part 2

Trip Planner:

I like the idea of trip planner, but its implementation blows. I think it's pretty cool. This one I wasted hours on because I simply could not believe that it wasn't possible. I have a series of routes that I like. I want to create a trip. I create the trip, it asks for a start and end. Ok, Pittsburgh to Nashville. It generates the route. Now, I want to say, insert my Blue Ridge Parkway route into this trip. Guess what. Can't be done. I have looked at every screen, every menu, every blog post I could find. Can't be done. The closest thing that I came too was I have to exit Trip Planner, export my route to a file, then import it into my trip day. Isn't that just slightly insane?
I have a route that's over 30,000 miles long. I export that route to a file, import it into my trip. Now I want to break that route up into a 3 month long trip. Give it a shot. I dare you. I gave up trying. The only solution I have found that works, is I make a copy of my route. I then delete all but what I think I can pull off in one day. Then I make another copy of the original and do the next segment. and so on and so on. Works great until I change the route, then I have to start all over again.
Garmin, here's about 30 grand worth of free UX consulting services for ya. My gift. Take your existing Trip Planner and throw it out. Hit the delete button. Get it GONE. Trip Planner 2017: First acknowledge that routes are simply snippets of a trip. The route can be done by themselves, or, multiple routes can be stitched together into a trip. So over time, a user will assemble a large library of routes. Could be dirt bike trails, or the run to grandmas. Doesn't matter. But as far as Trip Planner is concerned, they are just snippets. So, Trip Planner -> New Trip. Go ahead and ask the start date (not the end date, just the start), ask the daily travel time. And that's it. Hit create and a new trip is on your screen. Top left corner of the screen, where you currently have the days list, will be two binder tabs at the top, The Journey, and The Days. You click on The Journey. These are your routes. The intent here (as indicated by the first time user popup help screen) is that the user plans the roads of their entire trip. You copy in that intelligent address and activity finding thing you have so the user can add addresses or locations to the route list. Then there is a button for routes. Three options here, "Link Existing, Copy Existing, New" Link existing will link a route from your library into your trip. In the trip, its read only, but outside the trip, if the route is changed, its updated within the trip as well. Copy is exactly that, I copies and no link to the original exists. Now, you can unlink a linked route, but you cannot link a copied route (tried that once, the code is just way too ugly), and add is self explanatory. So you have your addresses, waypoints, and routes all in a list that can be reordered at will. You create routes and stitch everything together and reshape as desired until you have your whole round trip loop. Or, you can plan a one way trip and simply click a button indicating to reverse it for the return trip. Once you have your loop. For example, Pittsburgh, to Blue Ridge Parkway, to Nashville, to Chicago, to Pittsburgh. Once I have my route complete, I'm done here, and I switch over to The Days tab. Now this is key, nothing you do on the days tab can or will change the journey. What I mean is, if on the days tab I choose to book a room in a town 5 miles off my journey, my GPS unit will keep me on the journey route as long as it can, then route me to the hotel. The next morning, I get back on my bike, I hit resume journey on my GPS and it takes me back to the journey route and resumes. It doesn't try to redraw the journey on me. Also, if I am on a journey, and I see something interesting and shoot 30 miles off the journey, the journey doesn't redraw. When I'm done farting around, I click resume journey and my unit gets me back onto the journey route as quickly as possible and continues. So, Back to the days tab. Here we have a special waypoint "End of Day" I can create EOD waypoints either on an address (like a hotel) or by just dropping on the map (maybe I'm camping). If the distance between my EOD waypoints exceeds my daily travel time, I get a warning. I can even grab waypoints from my journey and make them EOD waypoints. Say in my journey I have grandmas house as a waypoint. Well in days, I can indicate I'm staying at grandmas for 2 days. Now, in cases where I'm hitting the same route twice, meaning I planned a one way journey and then reversed it to get home, If thats the case, the system will prompt me for some more details when I create an EOD waypoint. So if I am going to and coming home using 522, if I drop an EOD waypoint on 522, the system will ask me if I intend that waypoint for the southbound run or the northbound run. Waypoints can also have additional information. If I drop an EOD waypoint on a hotel, I should have an area where I can enter a confirmation code. For you international guys and gals, if I cross borders, the system should notify me that I'm going to have to remember my passport, and where to go in order to get the proper visa's and travel papers. All of this information is stored in the trip. That way I can print the trip out and have all my travel information on one sheet of paper, or in my phone app.

Ok, I'm done ranting for now. I really want BaseCamp to work because I hate using multiple applications. I just can't understand what the designers were thinking when they put some of this stuff together. They probably weren't thinking, it was probably managers designing it and they are the absolute worst of the worst at this kind of stuff.

If anyone has any solutions to some of my problems, please, let me know

0 SUSSAMB over 7 years ago

Well I'm no programmer but have used BC for a while, and use it to plan on road and off road routes. I don't really have any issues with it, and some of the points you raise are simply how you'd prefer it to work.

For example you want BaseCamp to know what you're thinking when you place a waypoint in the wrong place. How on earth can it know that it's wrong and not what you intended?! You also complain about shaping points being announced etc when you don't want them to be. If you set them to 'Don't alert on arrival/shaping point' they aren't announced on the more recent devices, so it's a device issue rather than a BC issue, which device do you have?

You say you've used BC for 2 days. It's a complex program that needs a bit of effort to understand it fully but in that respect it's no different to many other programs, I've used MS Word for years but still hardly use or understand many of its functions :)

I won't comment on Trip Planner as I don't use it, preferring instead to create individual routes.

0 SCPhantm over 7 years ago

The intelligence thing is easy. The route already has a vector based on the start and end. sometimes the waypoint is the end. Using that vector, it can look at the road you are by to determine if you are going north, south, east or west. With that, it can determine which lane you should be in and drop it. Now the tricky part is the tolerance. For that, you need to look at the zoom level. if you are zoomed out to the entire planet, that tolerance may be 100 miles to hit an interstate, but if you are zoomed all the way in, it may be 10 feet. Its all driven by the zoom level. Now, once thats done, you build in a system similar to Autodesk Inventor which is the concept of constraints. If this intelligent system dropped your shape point on a particular lane and for some reason you want to loop back to the north bound lane or you want to go high five a random tree, no problem. hover over the point and in the info box that comes up is a dot in the corner indicating its a constrained point. you click that dot and it becomes a circle and the intelligent system lets you drop it wherever you want.

piece of cake, should take a good GIS programmer about 2 weeks to write it and about 4 weeks to test it out. Hell, most of the systems needed to make it work are most likely already there.

And i haven't tried uploading to my device yet. Im talking about the info page in BaseCamp. There is a turn by turn directions page within BaseCamp. Thats the one im talking about.

Yes i know its complex, my complaint is it doesn't have to be.

0 AugustFalcon over 7 years ago

Your "put it in the correct lane" algorithim seems to be a slightly advanced development of the "snap to road" function that runs on most of the on-the-road units to correct the location displayed to the nearest road.

You have won the award for the Best First Post EVAR! on this forum :-)

0 SCPhantm over 7 years ago

Thanks.

It just irritates me when companies do this. They get so big that they begin to cut corners simply because they can. I could go on with this list too...

In Trip planner. How about a cost budgeter? My bike takes 3.6 -3.8 gallons of premium and i get 140ish miles out of that. When im planning a trip, why can't i put that information into a vehicle profile (i have multiple vehicles) and say, I'm taking the Kaw, guestimate my fuel costs. It then goes to one of the half a dozen or so fuel prices databases on the internet, grabs the prices along my route for that day, then checks the routes, finds appropriate gas stations on my route, circles them and says hey, "On this trip, you should expect fuel to cost you about $578 and we have added suggested fuel stops to your map. Why is that so difficult? When I drop a hotel, I should be able to enter the price of the hotels that I booked. I should have a food estimator, that says I'm going to budget $25 a day for food. Im taking the ferry, chart says it costs this, It already knows about toll roads so throw that into the mix as well. Ok, whats my estimated trip cost?
Eliminate the Google Earth interface and adopt one thats actually useable long term. Its not that the google earth UI is wretched or anything, it does what its supposed to do, but you have to be a master user to realize how to use multiple files. Modify that tree and say, ok, you now have a universal file and a trip file. Your universal file is where you put "Grandmas house", "Brothers house", whatever. Then you can have other files that you can open and close as well, maybe you want all your hammer drop routes in one files for when you are in the car. Or you want a file full of routes for your snow machine, whatever. Open and close them and layer them on at will. But when you create a trip file, it simply copies the data from the various files used to compile it into the trip file so the trip files always stay a self contained entitiy. Then, What about versioning those files? I certainly would like it if i could open one of my 2014 trips and say, you know, it was good, but not great. Click create version, enter 2016, end edit the file. Now I can compare the 2014 trip to the 2016 trip. This is nice because what if i ended up liking the 2016 trip less and want to revert back to the 2014?
Multi-user collaboration with DropBox or Google Drive. One trip i planning is going to involve people from 3 different states meeting up. Why can't I put this file in the DropBox folder (maybe Garmin Cloud could do this) and have other people enter their data into the same file right in BaseCamp? So now, everyone can see, Wayne's flight is arriving in anchorage at 5:00pm, Carl and I are arriving at 2:00pm, oh, theirs their flight information right in the file. Well the motorcycle rental place is right down the street, so we are going to meet at the rental shop and go from there. Or if we are going to Maine or something. Why can't I put a "Meetup" waypoint on my map, share it with my brother (along with my route) and he plan his route to that meetup point in the same file. That way, 2 days later I decide to change the Meetup point, he automatically gets it, he just needs to resnap his GPS and off he goes. Why is this not done?

I realize BaseCamp is a free product so there is no development budget for it, but it doesn't have to be. Build one in the cloud, small little utility (maybe Garmin Express) that can take the data from the cloud and load it on your GPS. Charge me $15 a month for it. If it had these kinds of features available, My only question would be "do you want a visa or paypal?". Have 2 different types of accounts. One free, read only. You cant create anything but you can read what other people have shared (including your friends who have shared with you) and a $15 one that allows you to edit things. I would love that.

I would write it myself if I had the time. I certainly know the people that could help me pull it off, I just don't have that kind of time in my life.

0 AugustFalcon over 7 years ago

Re your #1 above: Had a DOS program in the 90s that would do that for my airplane: auto routing on airways, altitude selection base on winds aloft forecast, optimized fuel burn, fuel stops, weather along route, alternate airport selection, and a generated printout with all the info for the cockpit, all for a one time price of $200 for the program.

You might want to look at Furkot.com for an online version trip planner that would pretty much handle your scenario above.

0 SUSSAMB over 7 years ago

While it's interesting to hear your views this forum can really only help you manage BaseCamp 'as is'. If you want changes to BaseCamp you really need to post your ideas here

http://www8.garmin.com/contactUs/ideas/

Having said that I don't see much evidence of any future Garmin development of BC, I'd be delighted to be proved wrong although for my use BC now is very stable and does everything I want it to do.

0 SCPhantm over 7 years ago

Re your #1 above: Had a DOS program in the 90s that would do that for my airplane: auto routing on airways, altitude selection base on winds aloft forecast, optimized fuel burn, fuel stops, weather along route, alternate airport selection, and a generated printout with all the info for the cockpit, all for a one time price of $200 for the program.

You might want to look at Furkot.com for an online version trip planner that would pretty much handle your scenario above.

I miss Rand McNally Trip Planner. Oh that was great. I really miss that tool. I think i still have files for it somewhere around here. It did the same thing as well

I stumbled across furkot the other day too. Its a lot closer to what I want than BC is, thats for sure. I'm planning my current trip with it so we will see how I like it. There are already things I wish it had, looks like I'm just going to end up writing my own extensions and maybe interface them into Forkut somehow. Hopefully they have an API.

0 AugustFalcon over 7 years ago

...I stumbled across furkot the other day too. Its a lot closer to what I want than BC is, thats for sure. I'm planning my current trip with it so we will see how I like it. There are already things I wish it had, looks like I'm just going to end up writing my own extensions and maybe interface them into Forkut somehow. Hopefully they have an API.

The Furkot developers are very accommodating. If you give them a suggestion and they like it it will show up in Furkot sometimes within hours! They follow along in the "FURKOT the online trip planning tool" thread over on AdvRider.com or the "Help me improve Furkot, a free online road trip planner" thread on the same site. The developer's handle is "melitele"

0 N4HHE over 7 years ago

"Put it in the correct lane" already exists, partially. Just reverse a route and it moves to the other lane. So this is by no means an unreasonable expectation.

As for 14 waypoints to keep on the highway, am guessing one's Zumo 595 and BC are in Motorcycle Mode which is "avoid highways".

I have more issues with route on BC being changed when imported on GPS no matter matching maps on both. Disable automatic reroute/detour seems to help.

Having used Garmin products since 1996 I have lost any expectation of innovation or brilliance. Seems to be more of a case of "infinite number of monkeys" development. Have quit being surprised when my Nuvi 765 or 1490 crashes. At least the Mac version of BC is sloppy about filename case, if your root filesystem is case sensitive (Apple option, not default) the BC knows GPS is connected but silently fails to transfer data, but Garmin Express works. Even today if your root filesystem is not case sensitive but your Time Machine backup volume is, BC pesters asking permission to search the Time Machine. Why does BC want to scan all my mounted volumes?

Sadly I haven't found anything better than Garmin, but I keep looking. Recently purchased a very expensive Zumo 595. Find the documentation is lacking, especially on Bluetooth. It takes two BT pairings to iPhone for everything to work. With one the Zumo takes control of the music player on phone yet audio does not go through Zumo. Also gets weather and traffic from phone to Zumo. Apparently the 2nd BT pairing allows the iPhone to send things to the Zumo such as incoming text and phone numbers. Why two? Why can the Garmin app on iPhone send some things but not others? Why is this not better explained? Why does the Zumo cancel my random play setting? Neither Sony, Subaru, nor Tesla disables random play when connecting to my phone. Plus the random play button on Zumo is essentially unreadable as to whether the feature is enabled or not.