Tuesday, June 5, 2007

Plazes updates

Plazes has rolled out its promised updates, which address a number of issues I had with the previous version, though many of the improvements still feel a little half-baked. You can now edit old plazes (locations you've visited), which is helpful for cleaning up junk - when I was in Europe recently, no matter what I did I couldn't persuade Plazes that I was no longer in the States, and it added all sorts of bogus locations in the US with similar place names to the places I was trying to locate myself in Europe, so I've been able to tidy up those to some extent. But although it lets you modify the addresses of old locations, it doesn't update the map display to reflect the new address (you can do this by manually panning and zooming the map, but this is rather laborious if you want to move a point from the US to Europe!). You can add locations that you've visited in the past but can't add a time that you were there, so they don't appear in your history, which makes this feature limited in usefulness. You can enter future locations which is potentially very useful, but at the moment you can't enter a time when you plan to be there, only a day, which again is fairly limiting. Their Plazer software which is a downloadable application seems to work better for me on Windows than the previous version did, but the Mac version doesn't work for me at all, and several others seem to have had the same problem (I bought a MacBook last week).

So overall summary, definitely some good steps forward, but still quite a lot of items on the high priority wish list.

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