Windows Phone Thoughts: Prairies to the Coast - A Ride With iGuidance 3.0

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Wednesday, September 27, 2006

Prairies to the Coast - A Ride With iGuidance 3.0

Posted by Don Tolson in "HARDWARE" @ 08:00 AM


Setting Up a Route
When you start up iGuidance, it automatically powers on the GPS unit and attempts to establish a connection with the GPS network to determine your current location. I didn’t see an option to turn off the GPS unit specifically within the software and there’s no mention of this capability in the documentation. The extra load on your battery could reduce its life significantly. Fortunately, when you exit from iGuidance it shuts down completely and takes the GPS unit with it. Careful though, the ‘X’ button in the System Bar at the top of the screen does not exit the application. As is normal in Windows Mobile, it just puts it aside, leaving the GPS unit running.

Like most other navigation software, iGuidance provides a variety of methods to find and set a destination.


Figure 4: Options for defining a Destination.

You can define a destination by address, intersection, Point of Interest (PoI), city centre, contacts from your Pocket Outlook database, or even the lat/long coordinates! (Be careful with this latter option, however. If the position coordinates do not leave you ‘on the road’ from iGuidance’s maps’ point-of-view, then routing will not work properly.)

Once you have selected a destination, three buttons at the bottom of the selection screen determine how you wish to use it.


Figure 5: Tapping the NAV button tells iGuidance to set up a route to navigate you to the destination from your current location. The FAV button saves it to the Favorites file, and the MAP button shows you where it is located on the map.

iGuidance always assumes routing from either the current position, or the last destination reached, so initially I could not find a way to ‘preload’ a route from my office to my client 170km away, which I do every week. Actually, I would love to be able to pre-define a route and save the whole thing as a Favorite, but I haven’t seen that capability in any navigation software yet.

The features list for iGuidance v3.0 states that there is support for multiple waypoints/stopovers, but the documentation only talks about the ability to add one stopover and only after the final destination is selected and routing has been established, (i.e. you’re on your way). When using the software, however, once you have a destination defined, it seems to assume that any other destination you attempt to define while enroute is a stopover. Using the menu system to set destinations, it frequently asked if I wanted to continue to an ‘old’ destination (even though I had cleared the route) and I only saw the “Do you want to define this as an Origin, Destination, or Stopover?” screen inconsistently. An undocumented feature which does work consistently though, is to tap and hold a position on the map. Doing this brings up a menu which allows you to select that point as either an origin, a destination, or a stopover.

After a bit of searching around, I did find the Itinerary functions which allow you to establish a route with multiple stopovers.


Figure 6: The Itinerary functions.

It works in basically the same fashion as the Destination screens, except that it then saves each destination in a list, which you can manipulate to move the relative positions of each in the route.


Figure 7: Reviewing the Itinerary. Note you can use the arrows to change the order of stopovers.

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