Rant to Nat'l Geopgraphic: Thaks for TOPO! but...

[themacko]

This is a pretty shitty port. I was way too excited for this app to be coming to Mac; I use it daily in class, work and play. So I get an Arizona TOPO! for Christmas (thanks bro!) and fire it up. I gotta tell you, I was IMMEDIATELY disappointed with it's general speed. In the time it takes to change the map display, you could have hiked the damn trail and been back.

Besides the speed, this app is just as ugly as Mark MacGuire's lookin' right now. Some light purple color with freaking lame looking menu buttons. This thing looks so much like a Linux job, they might have well released the thing as such so both Mac AND linux users have access. It'd probably run faster, anyways. Here's a screen cap because I'm bored tonight:
http://homepage.mac.com/scottmackey/...y_software.jpg

Import time is slow as well, but that could be to due to the fact that Garmin's GPS units STILL are coming with serial connection cables. Let's get with the new century, folks. Those things went the way of the floppy a LONG time ago. I digress...

So after it seemingly take an hour to import 84 waypoints and 1887 trackpoints (it takes about 2 min. on a PC) it freezes. Not completely, but it sits there and spins yer beachball for another 10 minutes. The first few times it did this, I assumed it was DOA so I just forced-quit the mother.

Conclusion:
So if you're not in any big hurry to get out in the field, or, don't have a girlfriend, job, dog, tv show to watch, etc. I'd highly recommend this EXTREMELY useful app. If you have other shit going on in your life, I'd just doing like me: do your TOPO! stuff on a PC, home [Mac] version is for emergency purposes only.

[chornbe]

Makes you wonder if the devs did *any* usability testing and, if so, what in the hell made them say, "Yep, it's ready. Ship it."

Sorry, man