I’m embarassed to admit it, but I’ve had a TomTom ONE 130 for a while and haven’t used it. My older sister and brother-in-law gave it to me as a Christmas present, and it’s been sitting unopened in my office for ages.

Why?

Because I just haven’t had a calling for it. I like using maps. Maybe it’s the Boy Scout in me, but I’m cool with just using maps. Plus I enjoy having my own sense of direction. If I get lost, I’m usually able to navigate my way out just using some reasoning and sense of direction. I prefer to rely upon my wits instead of some device, because speaking as a software engineer well… let’s just say I know what bugs are. 😉  Wife and I have gotten along this far in life without a GPS. We ask directions, we use maps, we know how to navigate the land, and frankly if we do get lost we don’t mind driving around a bit more because hey… it’s just all part of life’s adventure. It’s fun!

I also think it’s because most of my driving is done locally, and I’m pretty familiar with Austin’s roads. I really don’t need some device to get me around. I think once or twice I’ve thought “gosh, if I had a GPS it would have been easier to find this, but I found it without the GPS so… eh.”

I do think GPS technology is really cool. When I think about taking long trips into unknown areas, I think a GPS could be useful. Since they have functions like finding landmarks, hotels, gas stations, ATM’s, and those sorts of things, that’s a great deal of usefulness, especially if you’re in unfamiliar waters. One reason I want an iPhone is just for this sort of thing. Heck, TomTom is supposedly bringing their software to the new iPhone. Being able to fully get around, maybe find a hotel from the road, call it to see if they still have rooms and at what price, and so on. All useful things.

So anyway, since we have a funeral to attend and it’s in some middle-of-nowhere town Texas, I figured this would be a useful time to pull out the TomTom and see what it could do. I’m currently getting it configured, updated with all the maps and such (man, that’s expensive), and getting it ready to go. Since I’m a software developer, I can’t help but look at it from a programmer’s perspective, and they did a lot of nice things. I do think the Mac desktop client app, TomTom HOME, is a bit clunky because they didn’t write it as a Mac-native app (is this Java?). Little things like that which look like popup buttons have behaviors like combo boxes. Little things like that. Oh, and crashing too.

We’ll see what comes of it. So far it seems pretty neat.

Updated: Well, that didn’t last long. I’ve been running the updaters on it, going through the forced upgrades and such. I think everything is good, but then I remove the device and get a flashing red X. Look it up on their website, I need to disable Spotlight on the device. OK, that was dealt with. I try again, still flashing red X. So I use their instructions to uninstall then reinstall. Do this a few times. Still nothing but a flashing red X. In fact, the downloads vary. One time I got all of the applications and voices and other files, but now all I get is the application. I wonder if the fact the HOME application crashed one time while updating things somehow hoarked stuff.

I don’t know… I’m fed up. I’ll try calling their tech support in the morning.

Updated 2: Got on with their tech support, and spoke with “Gary” who was friendly and helpful. Gave him my information, explained the problem. He said since I had tried all the usual things without much luck, that the next step was to reformat. So I did that. Went into Disk Utility.app and did a nuke and pave… reformatting the TomTom’s internal drive. Then hooked it back up to the HOME desktop software, it recognized things were empty, it downloaded and reinstalled the main application and USA/Canada map (which takes a long time over that USB cable; I wonder if it’s USB 1 because it’s mighty slow). After that, it ran a few more updates to get all the updates. I also had to manually reinstall the voices. But after that, all seemed better. In fact, it seemed better than it was originally as a lot of other options in the HOME software became available.

So, while I got off to an inauspicious start with the device, in the end it seems to be working well. Nuke and pave, is there anything it can’t cure? 🙂

Oh, I’ll make one suggestion for Mac users. As soon as I reformatted the TomTom’s drive, the first thing I did was disable Spotlight from searching on it by going to System Preferences, Spotlight, Privacy, and adding the “INTERNAL” drive to the list. But I also did a secret little thing. Launch the terminal and:

$ cd /Volumes/INTERNAL
$ touch .metadata_never_index

And that’s all. What this does is creates an invisible “secret” file named “.metadata_never_index” that the Spotlight mechanisms will look for as a hint to never index this volume. I opted to do this because for some reason at time I’ve noticed the Spotlight Privacy panel will forget volumes listed on it, so adding this secret file ought to be good insurance to keep Spotlight from ever touching the volume. Here’s hoping.

Then once all the Spotlight stuff was disabled, THEN I did all the updating and so on.

Now if I can put my geek/programmer hat on….

I must admit, I think the way the TomTom folks designed things is pretty slick. They let you drive everything from the desktop software and manage it all from there. While I think the GUI is very non-standard, it’s simple enough to understand and get by, and that’s what’s really important. I do think sometimes it could be better about flow; this goes for both the desktop software and the TomTom’s device software too. That is, sometimes you do something on a screen and want to keep working on that screen, but instead it exits you out to some earlier point in the process and you have to click click click click click to get back to where you were. For instance, in the HOME desktop software, there’s no way to just load up all my computer voices at once… I have to load one voice, then it exits me back to the main voices panel, click click, load next voice, etc..  Or on the device, I might want to change the alarm status for points of interest; it’s naturally a list, let me check and uncheck things as I want to then “Done” to accept the changes and exit or “Cancel” to discard all changes and go back to the original setup… but instead once you click something to (un)check it it takes you all the way back out to the main nav screen and you’ve got to click around to get back to the list. Fine if you’re working with one item, annoying if you want to work with more than one.

But I do appreciate how they did things as a device. It’s just hardware with a drive. That you can totally nuke the drive and the desktop software knows how to download and install and get it all going again, that’s great for disaster recovery and simplifying many processes. I like how they did that.

Really, from a geek perspective I like how they put it all together. We’ll see how my actual experiences go once I start actually navigating somewhere with it.