Thursday, November 02, 2006

Brabys maps and Shell Geostar

Ever been looking for directions? Here are two fantastic sites worth having a look at:

www.brabysmaps.co.za/brabys/directions.asp

and

www.shellgeostar.co.za

Both give you step by step directions to your destination with distances. Braby's gives you the speed limit as well. It also provides you with the option to change your route, but I couldn't for the life of me get it right. That feature would have been nice because both sites sent me down some extra roads. For example, for my trip down to Plett it sent me off and on the main highway a couple of times.

Either way the maps did end at the right place, and they even started pretty much from my house.The distance and time feature is also really handy for calculating long trips.

Updated: Found a lot more bugs with these sites. Still quite handy though (especially if you're trying to clock up kilometers on your car allowance :D) for generating maps to functions and emailing them.

Lately I have found Google Maps quite handy. I used it to find my way out to the last church camp out past Magaliesburg, and it was great. The roads were all there - well until we got to the dirt road, but I had no pie-my-eye dreams of seeing that so it was fine.

Knocked it down a notch as promised. Got you're spice weasel? BAM!

3 comments:

Rich said...

I tried to use Brabys to get to Sodwana, and it sent me around JHB for hours and hours before a magical teleportation to KZN. Well that's what would have happened if I followed the map. Geostar didn't have Sodwana...

Mike the Tike said...

Haha :D I can believe it. I have gotten some dumb directions from there as well. I was going from Glenvista to some road in Linmeyer, I can't remember the name, and the very helpful directions I got were :

Step 1 :Leave Johannesburg
Step 2 : Turn left into road x

Seems there's a fine line between Artificial Intelligence and genuine stupidity. In general the site is quite good though. Still - if its ok with everyone - I'm gonna knock this one down a notch. BAM!

Chris said...

It's really great to see that Google now has map data for SA... although the mobile version (www.google.com/gmm) still doesn't work for me. Oh well :-p