What is the advantage of buying from the App Store vs download from Garmin?
Hi Marc,
First, I'm a complete newbie so other posts and experiences will be of greater value to you.
Oh... BaseCamp is 'FREE' so no purchase is required.
My limited experience was that I donwnloaded BC from the Garmin website directly and started working with it. I found that I got a lot of BC crashes with the app, so on one ride I was thinking about it and thought maybe I somehow got something corrupted with the installation and that I should uninstall and reinstall.
I was doing some searches and by mistake I found out that BC was available as a download from the Apple App store, so I tried that next and somehow, probably by chance it acted more stable and did not crash as it did before, but it was one version older then what I could have downloaded from the Garmin web page.
The last two upgrade versions 4.4.5 & today 4.4.6 have been amazing, its like what you would expect for a Mac software upgrade.
Garmin is really doing a great job with this Mac app.
I was waiting for the 'drag and drop' fix, which is my favorite technique for building a route. Start, Finish, Calculate, Drag & Drop. I'd always downloaded from Garmin in the past and didn't see 4.4.6 on their site today, so I used the App Store. Worked quickly and well. The BUY bottom caused a momentary concern, but it was free.
I'm waiting for the version that Garmin posts. In the past, some App Store versions have been crippled, to meet Apple requirements. No idea if that's still the case, but I'm in no rush.
Software on the AppStore can have more restrictions because of Sandboxing required by Apple. However, the external functionality between BaseCamp AppStore and WebRelease versions are identical as far as I know. Because of Sandboxing, BaseCamp preferences are saved in different folder for the AppStore version. This means that if you have both the AppStore and WebRelease versions of BaseCamp installed, then you will have to set your preferences separately for each.
The WebRelease of BaseCamp 4.4.6 was posted to garmin.com/mac today, so folks should be getting auto-update notifications for the new version now.
As a side note, the majority of the 4.4.x versions of BaseCamp faced stability issues primarily because of an updated external library that we had to upgrade to. We think that we have finally stabilized the problems with the 4.4.5 and 4.4.6 releases, but keep the error report and forum posts coming. Your feedback is very helpful and greatly appreciated!
Software on the AppStore can have more restrictions because of Sandboxing required by Apple. However, the external functionality between BaseCamp AppStore and WebRelease versions are identical as far as I know. Because of Sandboxing, BaseCamp preferences are saved in different folder for the AppStore version. This means that if you have both the AppStore and WebRelease versions of BaseCamp installed, then you will have to set your preferences separately for each.
The WebRelease of BaseCamp 4.4.6 was posted to garmin.com/mac today, so folks should be getting auto-update notifications for the new version now.
As a side note, the majority of the 4.4.x versions of BaseCamp faced stability issues primarily because of an updated external library that we had to upgrade to. We think that we have finally stabilized the problems with the 4.4.5 and 4.4.6 releases, but keep the error report and forum posts coming. Your feedback is very helpful and greatly appreciated!
Thank you very much for the detailed info on Sandboxing.
I've installed the auto-update version and drag-n-drop is working just fine.
