What is Automap Road Atlas 2.x?

Before I had Automap, I spent hours planning long road trips. I also spent hours getting lost on those trips. Automap Road Atlas saves me a lot of time and a lot of frustration.

Automap uses a database of freeways, highways, and state and county roads to calculate routes between more than 120,000 North American locations. It’s a tool for finding the best routes between cities and towns. Unlike some CD-ROM atlases. Automap’s database doesn’t include every street on the continent. Automap won’t help you find the best route between bookstores in Manhattan, for example. But the program fits on a PowerBook hard drive (using only 5MB of disk space), and unlike the CD-ROMs, Automap tells you how to get where you want to go.

After setting preferences such as driving speed and whether you like to drive on freeways or smaller roads, you tell Automap where your trip begins and ends by selecting points on a map or by entering place names in a dialog box. You can name up to four places that you want to visit (or avoid) along the way. Then you click on Calculate.

In a few seconds, Automap finds the quickest, the shortest, or the preferred route for your journey. Automap draws an easy-to-read map highlighdng the route and creates written driving directions with estimated travel times. You can adjust the level of detail and amount of territory the map displays, and then print the map and a separate sheet of directions.

To test Automap, I printed maps and driving instructions for businesspeople (well, bike racers and rock bands trying to earn a living) making more than a dozen 3- to 12-day trips diroughout the U.S. We still carried road maps, but we didn’t refer to them very often. We found Automap’s maps and especially its written directions easier to read and handle than the other maps. We all got to our destinations on time.

Automap finds recreational areas, reports state driving laws and populations, and lists phone numbers for local tourist and chamber of commerce information.

There is room for improvement. Automap gave a few directions like “Take the Unknown 15 miles.” The program can’t store more than one set of preferences. And Automap supports cut-and-paste exporting of its maps and data, but not tab-delimited data export. Also, the map window took about 30 seconds to redraw on a 40MHz 030 Mac. Although the lag is annoying, I found the result worth the wait. Still, Automap tells you how to get where you’re going better than any other map, atlas, or software I’ve seen.

Feeley, Jim. (July 1994). Automap Road Atlas for Macintosh 2.01. Macworld. (pg. 91).

Download Automap Road Atlas 2.x for Mac

Architecture

Motorola 68K

System Requirements

From Mac OS 7.0 up to Mac OS 9.2

Compatibility notes

Architecture: 68K

At least 2MB of free RAM (recommended 3MB)

Mac OS 7.x - Mac OS 9.2.2

 

Emulating this? It could probably run under: Basilisk II