Discovering Street Atlas USA Features

Like other street navigation software, Street Atlas USA displays road maps of the United States, finds addresses, and creates routes between two or more points. Check out a few other program features that are important to know about.

• POIs: All street navigation programs contain extensive databases of POIs. POIs refer to Points of Interest, not to Hawaiian side dishes made from taro root. POIs include restaurants (some of which might serve poi), hotels, parks, gas stations, and other locations you might be interested in while traveling. Street Atlas USA has a POI database that contains over four million businesses, services, and organizations.
• Voice support: If you’re using a laptop and GPS receiver as part of a car navigation system, Street Atlas USA can give you voice instructions when you need to turn to reach your destination. You can also use a voice recognition feature to give Street Atlas USA commands instead of using a keyboard or mouse.
• Routable roads: A big issue that all map companies face is ensuring that their road data is accurate, which can be very challenging considering the number of new roads that are built every year. Street Atlas USA has a feature that allows you to draw in roads that are missing on a map. After you create a road, Street Atlas USA can use it when calculating routes.
• Customizable maps: Street Atlas USA has an extensive collection of drawing tools for customizing maps with symbols, shapes, and text annotations. Street Atlas USA has many more features than I can cover in the space of this chapter (such as measuring distances and trip planning that takes fuel consumption as well as the number of hours spent driving into consideration).

To find out more about all the program’s features, visit www.delorme.com. Street Atlas USA comes on two CD-ROMs: one with the installation program and files, and the other with map data files. By default, you need to insert the map data CD-ROM each time you use the program. If you have enough space, you can copy the map data files to your hard drive; see the online Help for instructions.