Review of
DeLorme Street Atlas USA, Version 4.0
by Linda Fisher
Runs on Windows 3.1 and Windows 95 – (ed.note…also on the Macintosh!)
If you liked the AAA Triptiks, and you liked Mapquest–the free program provided by
Geosystems on the Internet–you will love Street Atlas USA. This program provides
maps at many magnifications, from a map of the United States to a map of a few city
blocks–any few city blocks you care to choose, anywhere in the United States. Street
Atlas USA presents the information that you require with much greater clarity and
precision than the AAA Triptiks, and it will be exactly the information you require,
not someone else’s.There is simply no comparison between the Street Atlas USA maps
and the fuzzy little Mapquest maps.
A when-all-else-fails-read-the-directions person, I nevertheless found myself able
to use this program immediately after installation, albeit in a limited manner, without
having read any directions anywhere. Installation was extremely easy, as is usually,
but not always, the case with Windows 95.
One of the most useful features of Street Atlas USA is its ability to map precisely
the pertinent information, excluding any irrelevant details. You can control the
amount of detail displayed for roads, railroads, and boundaries and also for landmarks,
such as lakes and rivers.
There are a number of ways to find a particular place. There is a pull-down menu–or
you can use an F key–either method enables you to locate the area in question by
phone number,by zip code, by the name of the place, its address, or by its latitude/longitude.
Given an exact address, the program places a house at precisely the correct spot
on the street.
The basic interface includes a Toolbar located over the Overview Map, and a Legend
box that updates automatically when you recenter, or change the magnitude.
At first, panning and zooming around and having a wonderful time, something I enjoy
enormously in PhotoShop and PageMaker, I seemed to wind up where I had not intended
to go, because I had become disoriented by changing the magnification. After all,
one part of a map looks about the same as another unless it happens to be your own
immediate neighborhood or your own state. However, the Toolbar enables you to change
the magnification without changing the center of the map, and you can also click
on View above the Toolbar, or you can click on the icons on the Toolbar itself ,
or you can do page-up and page-down.
You can mouse-click your way across the country, and it is fun, and, by a combination
of mouse-clicking at various points and zooming in and out, you can move rapidly
around the United States, zeroing in on whatever takes your fancy, having instantly
available detailed information about that particular area. This takes a little practice,
but not much. I followed Interstate 40 across the United States by clicking on the
left edge of the map, causing it to recenter further west each time.
The more ambitious traveler can copy-and-paste text from the on-line information
boxes for events, construction and weather into a word processing program, because
this version of Street Atlas USA has a connection to the Internet. So here goes:
US 65, Greenbrier, AR, Road reconstruction and resurfacing may cause lane closures
and delays, Est. Complete: July 98. Voilà! I just did it! You right-click on
the symbol that you have just downloaded, and immediately have the requisite information.
I clicked on a weather symbol and got a real heavy-duty weather forecast, then pasted
it into this review, but it took up a whole page, so it is gone now.
I hope they do a thorough job with the highway construction information. It looks
like they do, because once you download the highway construction information from
the Internet, the major metropolitan areas of your map become dense with highway
construction symbols, an obnoxious aspect of reality with which we are all familiar.
As an experiment, late in the morning I sent DeLorme e-mail requesting technical
support on what seemed to me to be one of the more obscure features of the program;
I received a courteous e-mail response about two hours later. I had tried to make
my question as arcane as possible to see if I could throw them off. I did not.
Street Atlas USA provides demographic information that could obviously be used for
commercial purposes, and other information that is obviously for users more sophisticated
than I. It has a Global Positioning System and it gives instructions on how to set
up your G.P.S. connection, and also tells the user where to find a listing of DeLorme-authorized
GPS receivers on the Internet.
You can get a zip code by entering a city and state and clicking Get ZIPS. The program
also has some draw functions: you can insert a note, or draw your own hiking trail.
The manufacturer does suggest a color printer, which I do not have, and I can see
why DeLorme suggests it. The highway construction symbols, appropriately a sinister
gray, blend in with everything else with the black and white printer. However, the
text and everything else on the map is as sharp and clear as anything anyone could
wish for.
The manufacturer estimates a street price of $45.00 for Street Atlas, USA 4.0.
Minimum requirements: 386SX/33 or higher (486DX/66 or higher recommended), 8MB RAM,
8MB free disk space, Win 3.1 or later, including Win95 and WinNT 3.51 or later),
Windows-compatible Super VGA card, 256-color monitor and mouse, ISO 9660-compatible
CD-ROM drive with 640+ MB read-capacity and Microsoft CD-ROM extensions, Windows-compatible
printer with 1.5 MB printer memory for 150 or 300 dpi laser printing, 6MB for 600
dpi (color recommended).
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