Finding Stuff

Quo Vadis offers some powerful search features including the ability to lookup roads, find all separate occurrences of the same named roads, find all intersections of the same named roads, or even find all intersections of all separate occurrences of the same named roads. To find something, select the Find... command in the Options menu. This will bring you to a Find Window, similar to that shown here. The top-right corner shows the category which your are currently searching. The “In:” option lets you pick which map you wish to search. Below that is a feedback box which tells you what you need to do to complete you search. Depending on your options, it will “flicker” to show you that it has changed. The “Lookup” field at the bottom of the window lets you instantly search for a map feature by entering its name. When you pick a map to view from the Map Directory, that map will be set as the default map to be searched when you select the Find command the first time. Tap the category popup to show the available categories. However, not all categories contain data in each map, even though all categories are listed anyway. Note that road names are properly sorted even when they include numbers. That is, “145th St” comes after “2nd St”. Traditional sorting methods always sort digit by digit and would list all roads starting with a “1” digit before all roads starting with a “2” digit and so on. Also note that some roads are preceded by a direction prefix, such as “S” for South, “E” for East, and so on. Currently, map names have to be entered correctly including their prefix in order to be found. So, in this example, a search for “Balcom St” would fail, since the true name of the road is “E Balcom St”. Future versions of Quo Vadis will likely have improved on this and will no longer require entering the exact name. For now, in the worst case, you will have to try four prefixes (N, E, S, W) if you cannot find the road the first time without a prefix. The result of a search is marked with a bullseye symbol. This symbol is always drawn regardless of the zoom level so you can zoom out and get a “bird’s eye” view of the found location. You can hide the symbol by selecting the Hide Find Target menu command. If there is more than one occurrence of a particular road pr intersection found, Quo Vadis will inform you of this fact, and allow you to view each one by using the Find Again menu command located in the Map View menu options. This will cycle through each of the results. Doing a Find Again after the last result has been shown will redisplay with the first result, and cause your PDA to emit a “beep” (assuming you haven’t disabled sounds in your system preferences). Multiple intersection results are handled in the same manner. Quo Vadis does not currently have support for multiple names for a single road. Thus, highways and freeways are almost always labeled with their numerical equivalent, rather than a common name, so if you are searching for a highway by name and cannot find it, this is probably why. Whenever possible, interstate highways, U.S. highways and state highways are labeled “I-ddd”, “US Hwy ddd” and “State Hwy ddd” respectively, where ddd represent digits or letters. Other road name abbreviations are common, and typically follow the U.S. Postal Service abbreviations.