Garmin RoadTrip (formerly Bobcat)
The software formerly known as Project Bobcat has renamed itself, and emerged as Garmin RoadTrip. Sporting the same super cool icon, a Mac like interface, and seemingly dropping the “beta” tag, RoadTrip is now available at garmin.com/mac.
We’ve been fairly critical about how many years it has taken Garmin to take the product from their announcement through several delays– but now we have what appears to be a final product. RoadTrip has shaped up very nicely, and for computer based route planning now trumps TomTom’s offering.
While Bobcat was in development, our biggest issue (as features were still being developed) was the speed of the application. Map pans, zooms, and address searches were terribly slow. But as someone with a software development background myself– I understand how code optimizations and tuning typically happen near the end of the development cycle, so I was encouraged by what I saw.
With the RoadTrip release, most of the operations are much faster now. However you still can’t zoom, pan, and search the map with the speed and ease of Google Maps.
I only have one remaining gripe with the program. The graphical representation of “collections” (aka folders) and then the “items” inside those folders such as routes, tracks, and waypoints might need to be reconsidered. It isn’t immediately clear the relationship between these folders/collections and their associated items. On quite a few occasions I accidentally deleted items, despite the warning message which I thought I understood. Also, there is no “are you sure?” warning on some of the delete actions although the ‘Undo’ option typically works.
I’ve been using RoadTrip (and Bobcat) to create routes, transfer tracklogs, and transfer waypoints/geocaches from handhelds like the Oregon as well as auto PNDs like the Nuvi 200 and 700 series devices. So far everything works very slick, highlighting the typical Garmin stability. If you are one of the many Mac users who has been screaming for full Mac support from Garmin now that RoadTrip is here along with POI Loader and WebUpdater– the time has come, complaints begone!
Nice, but it is still missing some functionality from MapSource specifically the route elevation profile.
Hello,
I just got a nüvi 760 and started using RoadTrip and the new Garmin mac tools, it’s a great improvement over the MapSource+Parallels Desktop solution, althouh I have two questions:
1) is there a way to DELETE stuff on the GPS from the desktop software? like tracks, favorites etc.
2) how do you install new maps NOT purchased with Garmin on the nüvi? RoadTrip and MapManager don’t seem to be reading .img map files
Thanks.