GPS software for Macs

[Richard Bryer]

Fred, you shudda

bought a Sincair Z80. It did about as much and only cost a couple of hundred. Same TV, same tape cassette. I am sure I had more than one game- I remember one was a skier. pretty primative graphics but then we thought it was pretty neat stuff

 

[Malcolm Young]

Fred - some clarifications...

Fred - I am back from a leisurely lunch and ready to pick up the GPS interface debate. It is snowing hard outside.Fred, I have followed this board for a few years now and note that you like to stir things up. It makes things interesting and I read most of your posts. I usually don't like to debate things on line and would prefer verbal debate however you are a long way away - that said there are some misconceptions that I would hate to leave unchallenged.First - the Mac does have PC software that works with many major GPSs including Garmin. I stated this partially in my first post on the subject - I made a mistake in assumming that people had followed the link on the first post. I will repost with yet an additional link - http://www.gpsnavx.com/ and http://www.macgpspro.com/ These are facts. If you look back at my original post you will note that Practical Sailor reviewed the first one and recommend it. As I understand it, both work with major brands of GPS for loading and displaying charts and your position on those charts on your computer.Now the confusion is that Garmin software does not do thisfor Macs, yet. That means that you cannot input to Garmin GPSs with Macs using Garmin software. Thus if you want to upload a bunch of waypoints to your Garmin GPS using 'Garmin software' on a Mac then you can't.Second - your Apple II comments - respectfully - you have your time periods and computers screwed up. When the Apple II came along IBM had not entered the Personal Computer field. They had main frames and mini computers. The Apple II+ that I had was truly 64k RAM with a 16k ROM for the operating system and instead of cassette tape drives, I sprang for 2 - 135k floppies so that I could copy the great many programmes that were available. I had a green monochrome computer monitor, however you could buy an adaptor and use your TV screen if you didn't want to buy the monitor. You could purchase many different cards that fit in slots on the Apple and could do a lot of things including control scientific equipment. Eventually in competition there were many personal computers made by Commodore, Atari, Radio Shack (TRS) etc. The inexpensive computers mostly interfaced through a TV and were gaming computers although Radio Shack (Tandy) later became an IBM clone. IBM eventually came along with a super expensive business oriented computer run by DOS (the first version was incredibly bugy). On my Apple I had a great deal of software which included word processing, spread sheets and a data base. It also included a great many games - my excuse is that I had an 10 or 11 year old son at the time We used to do the Sunday School accounting with it. My son did Basic programming and won a science fair competition. It was hardly a one dimensional computer. Sometime around 1981? Microsoft came out with Multiplan (a forerunner of Excel) for the Apple. It was a great programme and Excel still is one of the best that MicroSoft put out.By the way - Bill Gates may have uttered the words 'Plug and Play', however he most certainly didn't invent the functionality - and I know this by painful direct experience. He must have been once again copying the Mac which has been functionally plug and play since the mid 80s. Windows still hasn't quite managed that although XP is getting closer - as I said maybe Vista will do it.Another by the way (because I can't resistYou mentioned 64k as if it was but a pittance - In the mid 70s, I was involved in programming for Varian 32k machines which ran a nuclear unit. It was a very fast processor for that time period and we used an assembler that was virtually machine language. The computer and its back-up were incredibly fast and reliable. I wonder why MS hasn't got that right yet - sorry I couldn't resist the jab and it really isn't fair - Windows or Mac OS have to interface with humans and all of the things they want to do - not an easy task. Now speaking of Walt Disney's Wonderful World of Colour - it was on Sunday nights - it was the one night that we let the kids watch TV during supper. I used to carry that 500lb TV (only slightly exagerated) in to the eating area (trailing a long antennae lead) and we watched. Brings back memories...

 

[Malcolm Young]

One of links was wrong in previous post

I have edited my previous post in the thread on GPS Software for Mac to correct an incorrect link..

 

[John Nantz]

To Answer Ross's Reply #35

What to use? If I had to make a decision today, without having done a LOT of research and comparisons of the products available, I'd go with GPSNavX software (link provided several times on earlier replies) and their GPS add-on.One thing that they have that's very interesting, they make use of Apples "Quartz" software which does sharpening of vector data. This REALLY improves the appearance of details so one can zoom in and the image looks nice and sharp on the screen. They have a free demo download so you can give it a try on your Mac to see how it works.And for Fred, I could really use some help on cleaning up my ol' PC. It has issues like IRQ and COM problems, lots of miscellaneous files scattered around that I don't know what they're for so I don't know if I should delete them or not, etc., & etc. Keeping this thing maintained with the latest patches has been a LOT of work. The latest was good ol' Adobe Acrobat that *crewed things up with one of their updates. The cumulative effect of all this is what's got me started making the switch. My old computer went from blue screen to black screen! All I did - I thought - was change the default screen font/resolution size. Arrrrgh! Fortunately I had just previously captured the hard drive data files by unplugging it and connecting it to my present PC and transfer the data. Should have left well enough alone. If it ain't broke, don't fix it!