30 April 2008

Topozone transmorgifies into a less-useful thing

One of my favorite sites on the web was TopoZone dot Com but now I have learned that they have changed their business model completely -- now they want $50 a year for me to use the site. I have no problem paying for something that is useful but I am struggling to see how a subscription would be money well spent.

I am mostly interested in NH maps. When I tried out the "new" Trails dot Com (which purchased TopoZone), the sample NH trail map that I ended up turned out to be content from a book that I already own...

I am fairly certain that everything that Trails dot Com would give me for my subscription would also be easily obtained from the books and maps that I already own. I think that a lot of potential customers will make similar conclusions.

Thus, I think that Trails dot Com made a mistake, and that they are in for a pretty rough ride.

Oh, by the way, if you are looking for a good NH topo map, I think that the ones from Map Adventures are very very nice.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Completely agree. I noticed this the other day. I guess that's pretty much it for me and topozone, which is too bad, because it was a nice website.

Bill McGonigle said...

Google Maps has a 'Terrain' button now. Prettier than Topozone's, at least last time I looked at theirs.

I thought at one time Topozone had a terrain calculator which was useful for radio placement, but either I misremember or they got rid of it. Somebody had it anyway...

kdc said...

Google Maps is very nice, but it doesn't include information regarding hiking trails.

In the past, TopoZone basically displayed USGS maps, many of which gave some info regarding hiking trails. This was handy, and easy access to this will be missed.

Anonymous said...

It turns out that gmap pedometer does topo maps, and has some nice features that topozone didn't have. But I've found the site to be so slow that it's kind of unusable sometimes. But it's better than the trails.com alternative...

kdc said...

Thanks Dan for the tip! It is nice to have a decent alternative to what Trails dot Com now gives me.

I also happen to own a very old software package from MapTech that gives me topo maps. However, since I don't really have a Windows box in my house, I really haven't used this in years. I wonder if I could get this to run under Wine? And still....it is much more convenient to have this information be easily web-accessible....and nothing beats a good map that is in your hand out in the field...