Microsoft Hits the Road with Streets & Trips 2004 Drive-Time Zones and One-Way Streets Eric Grevstad
Mon 8/11/03 -- Get out of town. No, really, Microsoft wants you to get out of town, with help from an upgraded version of its popular Streets & Trips travel and mapping software.
Microsoft Streets & Trips 2004 ($40) adds real-time GPS support, so drivers who connect a Global Positioning System receiver to their notebook PC -- or to a Pocket PC running Pocket Streets, included with the main program -- can see their exact location on screen at virtually every turn. Another new feature, drive-time zones, lets travelers see how far they could travel in a specified amount of time.
The program's turn-by-turn driving directions -- offering door-to-door coverage for virtually all of the U.S. and Canada, with advanced searching for more than 1.3 million addresses, places, and points of interest -- have been updated, with one-way streets now clearly marked. A Route Planner makes it easy to add, delete, or rearrange destinations; unlike most Internet map sites, Streets & Trips 2004 lets you customize your map with multiple-destination driving directions showing the best route to all your stops, as well as a specially adapted set of familiar Office drawing tools.
Patented Snap-Routing technology lets you drag and drop a route anywhere on the map, and watch it snap into place while the map and driving directions recalculate automatically, even for the most complex journey. The program can point out points of interest including more than 492,000 restaurants, 128,000 ATMs and banks, and 58,000 gas stations.
