RouteBuddy - what has been happening since Macworld San Francisco?

The RouteBuddy team had a very successful and enjoyable week at MacWorld San Francisco. It was great to meet customers, potential OEM clients, representatives from other companies in the Mapping and GPS market, Mac User Group representatives…and some very nice Apple people too! As many of you probably know by now, we are based in the United Kingdom, so by next year hopefully our strange accents and pronunciation – “TopO” rather than “ToePo” Maps! – will not come as a surprise to anyone ☺ We were very grateful for the feedback we were given and came away with the feeling that there are many of you out there just hungry for a good Mapping product written specifically for the Mac.

So what happened after the show?

We came away with our heads buzzing with thoughts as to the table of events for the progression of the RouteBuddy product. Before leaving San Francisco we spent a number of hours in the hotel meeting room (plus a few on Pier 39 soaking up the weekend sun and atmosphere!) each recalling comments received to help us prioritise our work for the coming year. The most sought after feature was, of course, for RouteBuddy to further develop its Geocoding feature to enable address look up, followed Routing refinement.

So, what has been happening since MWSF?

To give you a bit of history – late last year, after farming worldwide response as to how people wanted geocoding to be, we started work on its implementation. To do this required not only new features in the application, but revisions in dealing with the raw data that is supplied to us by Tele Atlas, and then done so in some ways unique to ourselves. In a meeting the engineers presented the options to the key staff members at RouteBuddy on the pros and cons of adopting different methods. The bottom line was either – take the quick and easy route, which we avoided like the plague some time ago because all we would have had to offer is a modern (but primitive) mapping application that is not extensible or modular or take the hard route because that would mean in the future that not only could we adapt our version of the raw data to many markets but it would also mean that, long-term, our existing and new users would greatly benefit from an adaptable, modular and extensible product.

...and then?

One job always begets another… Through this very costly R&D process the engineering team came across other means to make even more advances in digital mapping, not only with the raw data that Tele Atlas supply us, but anything else out there that is free for you to use (when we open up this feature), to other paid-for data which we will eventually have on offer. So we all sat through several meetings over the last few months as cases were presented to add to, refine and improve RouteBuddy and RouteBuddy Maps.

..like what?

A case in point is our new proprietary compression engine. Most other map developers on the Mac or PC have stripped data out of their map files so that they could fit them on a set of DVDs and make them render reasonably well on a screen. The side effect of doing this is loss of fidelity and loss of fidelity means loss of accuracy. When RouteBuddy launched last year we decided to ship the RouteBuddy Road Maps “as-is” keeping the original data so that the maps lost no fidelity, this gives the Mac user the visual quality they expect. We did this as proof of concept so that we could deliver the data to a demanding end user be they Consumer, Business or Government clients. So with a large investment in R&D, for all the reasons above, it made long-term sense to build our own compression engine which will work efficiently with rich map and meta-data and really places RouteBuddy on a different level to other mapping applications. Why? Because anything else out there, on Mac or PC, will need a complete rebuild to be able to offer the same flexibility and usability built into RouteBuddy that digital map users will demand in the years to come.

..when?

We expect to make an announcement fairly soon. :)

Monday, 26 March 2007