 The magazine of the Melbourne PC User Group Atlas of Australia Bernadette Houghton bernieh@iaccess.com.au |
 |
If you're thinking of travelling somewhere within Australia, you probably intend to consult a map or two, and bone up on tourist attractions along your route. Now, a new CD-ROM, Atlas of Australia presents this information in a single package. Atlas contains the Hema maps of seven states and five capital cities, a large (1:4,500,000 scale) map of Australia, and the complete text of Random House's Discover Australia: Road Guide and Discover Australia: National Parks. These travel guides contain an overview of the history and tourist attractions of 900+ towns, cities and national parks, all of which are hyperlinked to the appropriate map reference.
Installation of Atlas follows the usual Windows procedure, although you might be a bit puzzled at the--undocumented-- options on the installation screen to install Intel Indeo 4.3 and DirectX 6.0. These are there just in case you have problems running Atlas; in that event, Technical Support will advise you to install them if necessary. So, just ignore them until told otherwise.
When you first start Atlas, you'll see two maps of Australia. Click
the smaller image to view the large (less detailed) map of Australia, or choose a state or city from the
larger map (Figure 1). Navigation is straightforward; hold down the left mouse button to "pick up" the map
and move it around the screen. Zoom in or out with a click of the mouse, or you can choose to use the
keyboard or joystick. A Guide window--which you can turn on or off--overlays the main window and displays a
smaller version of the current map; by clicking on the map or dragging the red rectangle, you can quickly
change the view in the main window (Figure 2).
|
|
|
Double-clicking on the map displays information about the clicked area. Alternatively, you can use the Index to browse information about selected attractions within each state (Figure 4). Since the Index is organised by state and then keyword (e.g. Beaches, Dams, Islands, Places of Interest), it is difficult to find all the attractions within a given area. A search facility helps a little, but doesn't offer a complete solution. Not all the attractions in the Index are linked to textual information. If you click an attraction without linked text, you'll be taken straight to the appropriate map. On the other hand, if text links exist, clicking the name of the attraction takes you to the text, and you can then choose to view the map by clicking the "Display Map" hypertext at the top of the screen.
You can also bookmark maps or text, annotate text, create slide shows, print maps or cut and paste them into other programs.
|
|
|
Assessment
Atlas is pretty much a text product which has been ported to the computer. Unfortunately, it doesn't take full advantage of multimedia capabilities. There is no sound, no graphics apart from the maps themselves, and hyperlinks are limited to the Index and the maps. Overall, I found Atlas easy to use, although it took me a few sessions to learn to navigate the Index (I finally worked out that I needed to repeatedly click the Index button to move up to the higher level indexes!). Sometimes I had problems displaying maps correctly and had to close and restart Atlas. This problem is related to my particular video card, however, and shouldn't occur on most PCs.
Despite these criticisms, Atlas of
Australia ought to be a useful reference for travellers--and it's cheaper than buying all the maps and the
Discover Australia books separately.
Reprinted from the May 1999 issue of PC Update, the magazine
of Melbourne PC User Group, Australia
