Route Planner

[geoffbaker]

When trying to calculate a route, I find the software is pretty patchy. Not buggy - because it does work - but boy, does it have issues!

When calculating a route to a known address, for instance (in this case the street East Paseo San Andres, 6.7 miles away), here are some of the issues...

If I try to use the "select from contact" option, it is just bizarre. I select the contact who I want to use.. "Mr Smith" whose address is "xxxx E Paseo San Andres, Tucson AZ 85710, United States of America"

and the route planner pulls it from contacts like this:

House number xxxxx successfully parsed
Street is returned as "E"
The zip disappears

So it is now searching for street E, house number xxxx... and it returns the error "Please select a valid country" because it doesnt like "United States of America" it wants "USA".

Even putting in USA in Outlook's contacts still returns the same error. Now,, that's programming genius!

If I correct the error, it then gives me a long list of every street name beginning with the letter E, but oddly it is clearly storing more of the address somewhere, because it first returns several East Paseo strets like East Paseo los Numeros, East Paseo das Tequila, etc (making these up here :)

and its worthless.

But I can navigate by the same map straight to the street, by panning and zooming - and the street shows up on the map, sure enough, as East Paseo San Andres - and it will then quickly calculate the route correctly...

So clearly, the engine that parses the contacts address info was written by a third grade Finnish student with no English skills...

I'm sure the next versions will get better...