Eyewitness World Atlas

Rating:
Summary: Wow. This is pretty great.
Review: If you have ever looked in a printed Atlas, you will note that for Africa, South America, and SE Asia, the countries are so small you can hardly find them. At least Goode's World Atlas is that way. This software shows each country on a full screen and shows the roads and railroads. If it is a large country such as Argentina, the map of the country is scrollable. When you bring up the country there is an index of the cities and geographic features shown to the left. Scroll down to the feature you want to find and click on it and behold, it is place on the screen and a bright red circle placed around it. That sure beats trying to find it using a magnifying glass and longitude and latitude. Another nice feature of this atlas is that when you select the country from the index, the country is displayed and to the left an index of pertinent data about the country. You can display the monthly temperture ranges in C or F. Monthy rainfall in in. or cm. Number of cars per 1000 population, number of PC's, number of TV's and a wealth of other information. Please note that some of this data such as the number of PC's is not known for all countries.

Do you want to know how far it is from one place to another within a country. Click on the first place and then click on the second and the milage is given. Not bad. I compared the number of place names on the map of Paraguay with the Goode's map of Paraguay. There were 50% more place names and feature names given.

Now for the critique. The interface is a bit bazar. Definitely not standard. When you start up the program, it displays a video of the earth with some unappriate music playing. Gee, who wants to watch a video of the earth to music. I guess some VP must have designed that. I sat there staring at the thing for about 10 seconds wondering how I get to the atlas. Finally, I clicked on the video and wa la it took me to the atlas. Now there are no maps of oceans and no maps of territories such as Greenland. This is a real failing for a world atlas. But this write up is for version I. When you try to connect to DK's home page from the atlas, you get a message that the page is no longer available.

Other than the flaws mentioned, this is a great product and vastly better than all but the really expensive--$100 printed atlas.