Bobcat - Garmin’s native Mac support

Garmin have released Bobcat a new application for the Mac which allows waypoint & track management. It also imports GPX files and has various other features. It runs on PowerPC but I’m unsure about native Intel support - one would assume so, since it’s a new application.

The products in in Beta at the moment but it shows a lot of promise and its user interface is already an improvement on clunky one found in MacGPS Pro . You can’t load your own map scans with Bobcat though, so MacGPS Pro still has it’s uses.

Bobcat does have a few odd choices in it’s own interface though. While there are keyboard short-cuts for the hand, zoom, pick, waypoint and track tools they all require the control key to be pressed. Selection of the hand tool, ‘control-h’ is a difficult one hand stretch (the other hand being on the mouse) and I’d like to see at least an option to use simply the ‘h’ key by itself. The same for all the other tool selections, ‘z’, ‘p’, ‘w’ and ‘t’ instead of ‘control-z’, etc…

It would also be very welcome to see an implementation of the ‘while the space bar is held, flip to the hand tool’ function that already exists in most of Adobe’s products. This is a very handy short-cut.

It’s also odd that the mouse wheel scrolls the view vertically, instead of zooming in & out as it does in most similar applications (Google Earth comes to mind).

Finally, the waypoint double-click action is a little bizarre. It brings up additional information while leaving the ‘go to on map’ function to a button at the bottom of the list. This seems a strange choice when it would appear 90% of the time you’ll want to jump to a point - well, I do anyway. At least an option to change the ‘default behaviour’ from ’show info’ to ‘go to on map’ would be welcome.

However, this is a Beta product and the lack of any context sensitive menus on right-click and various other missing features show that. I for one am extremely grateful that Garmin have brought this software to Mac users and I applaud Garmin’s foresight in supporting the Mac. I’m looking forward to the finished product - hopefully with a few of my requests included. ;)

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