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?
