Adventures & experiences in contemporary technology
One of the issues with an upheaval like that which I have experienced over the last week is that some things get messed up. Because of my hillwalking, I have electronic mapping for planning my excursions into the outdoors. My choice for this has been Anquet; I evaluated it and it did what I needed. I could have gone further with the evaluation but I couldn’t be bothered with the hassle. It’s a Windows-only offering as far as I know so good old VMware really proves its worth here.
The software itself is a free download but it’s the maps where they make their money, particularly with the 1:25000 scale mapping. I have a lot of 1:50000 mappping so it was with some disappointment that I discovered that it was no longer usable because licenses had got lost. Some of the data files needed updating anyway so I went ahead and did that in order to get something back. That exercise cost me some money but I got licenses and unlocking was possible. For the mapping where there were no updates, I needed to delete it and download it again, a slow process taking up many hours due to the size of the files and the way that Anquet delivers them. The updating had taken a similar amount of time.
At the end of this, all was well again. However, it would have been better if the licenses hadn’t disappeared and Anquet had a better way of restoring things than they do. I shouldn’t have had to re-download several gigabytes of data, even if it was better than having to fork out more cash to replace what I had.