Those of you who use National Geographic TOPO! products should pay attention to that NG is up to now. They are coming out with TOPO! Explorer (TEX), and they state that it is planned to supersede the older products, such as the TOPO! State series.
The problems I am aware of include:
* There is no plan to bring up all features of the existing TOPO! State series in TEX. That means not everyone will be willing to migrate.
* They are quite excited about their new trails database plans. That will be implemented only in TEX, not in any of the older products. This sounds poor, given that not everyone will be willing to migrate.
* While TEX can read the older products' data files, there is no plan to fix older products to read TEX' format (.trp) files. That means all sharing is one way — no sharing from TEX to any older product.
* Although TEX has been on sale for awhile now, it is (IMHO) alpha quality software (I just updated my copy today and tried it out). I may like it someday, but not for awhile yet. It has problems in all areas — functionality, usability, and speed problems.
* (Presumably) to hasten migration they have dropped all support for sharing the older data files (.tpo) on their web site, including those that were contributed by users.
Net-net: users of TOPO! State may well not be willing to migrate to TEX, at least for some time. In the meantime they are shut out from sharing any work done by TEX users, and shut out from the enhanced trails capability that NG is touting.
If this matters to you, check it out for yourself and let NG know how you feel. They will only react if they feel enough customers care.
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