“Amazon Price is Weird? “ this product (CA version) is listed for $149 at Amazon and at $99 at the National Geographic website and at REI. What’s up with that? 50% over the MSRP?

List Price: $99.99
Our Price: $79.95
You Save: $20.04 (20%)


Product Description

National Geographic Maps TOPO! State Series – Tennessee, Kentucky:

8 x 6 x 1

The leading outdoor recreation TOPO! software for more then 10 years. Available in 28 individual state and multi-state packages covering the entire United States. Compatibl
Features:
  • Print photo quality USGS topographic maps
  • GPS Ready – Easiest Way to tell your GPS where you want to go and record where you’ve been
  • Navigate in three dimensions with 3D fly-thru and instant elevation profiling
  • Customize maps with photos, notes and icons
  • Live Map Update ensures you always have the most current maps and software

Worst user interface that I’ve ever seen
TOPO! has the worst user interface ever created. It doesn’t follow the standard user interface designed by Apple, Adobe, and Microsoft.

- There’s no hand tool to move around the map–rather you have to move your cursor to the edge of the screen and click to push the map around. Hard to control and creates lots of cursor movement

- The tool to draw routes is hard to control…more info

Horrible UI, slow, and crash-prone
Do not waste your money on this horrible software. Even on a 2.4 GHz, 2 GB RAM MacBook Pro, it staggers to run. It takes an average of 20 seconds just to change zoom levels and pans incredibly slowly. Try drawing a route and half the time the whole thing freezes and crashes and you have to start over. I’ll say it again – DO NOT WASTE YOUR MONEY!…more info

CoupleQuarks
I have not used this product extensively but it had proven to be very useful for my needs. I am very pleased with it and only have a couple of comments. It has an excellent search tool and has found almost every location that I have searched on, even some very little and very remote campgrounds. This is what I was mainly interested in as the other software’s I have used are very (VERY) limited in this. The only two things that I have noticed is that it does have fixed zoom ratios and the wildlife areas that I am interested in are shaded dark grey when zoomed in which is somewhat maddening. They could have used a lighter grey as it is very hard to see the mapping in these shaded areas. That is the only reason I am dropping my rating down to a 4. This product is very user friendly and I would highly recommend it, so far it has been the best bang for the buck!. Digitizing the trails and creating profiles along with flyovers is as slick and easy as can be. The same goes with plotting GPS points from ASCII onto my TOPO maps or from them….more info

Better than the Garmin counterpart, but still not good!
The best part of this package is the possibility to have all maps in hiking friendly 1:24000 scale. Though these maps are not really up to date, not really recommendable for power hikers in the CA bay area. Also on the down side is the strange user interface, you really have to get used to it. Considering some crashes of the software itself I can only give 3 stars. But it is at least the best GPS mapping software I know, among the blind the one-eyed is king……more info