JGPSTrackEdit

Planning your route before going on vacation can save precious time otherwise needed to ask for directions or deciding upon the track while on the move. Computer applications give you the possibility to carefully design your own track from the comfort of your desktop, and JGPSTrackEdit makes no exception.

The available workspace is represented by a map provided by some of the most popular and frequently used web sites. Navigation is done simply by dragging your cursor around and using the mouse wheel to zoom.

Once you find a suitable spot, you can start clicking to create points that are mainly checkpoints. These can be found along with geographical coordinates in a list for easy management. Tracks are also enlisted, as you are able to create more on the same map, and toggle visibility or set different colors.

Besides manually setting every checkpoint of your journey, there is also the “Append routing mode” which cleverly creates the shortest route between two specified points.

Further tools allow you to manage already place points, create shortcuts, as well as splitting and joining tracks together.

The lack of a map had made routes a little difficult to plan, but there is enough room for improvement left. In other words, there is no implemented search engine so you have to manually look for every place, requiring at least basic geography knowledge.

Moreover, services and utilities must be looked over the Internet, with no way to know, for example, if you can spend a night at a hotel along the way or dine at a restaurant.

Taking everything into consideration, we can say that JGPSTrackEdit wants to make trip planing a pleasure, but is a little difficult to use. The process of creating the route itself is not complicated, the only obstacle being the not so friendly user interface. Overall this cookie needs to spend just a little more time in the oven to get just the right taste.