Select Street is fun and easy to use. The program opens with a map of the lower forty eight states, identifying each with its two letter abbreviation. This “Main Map” occupies most of the right two thirds of the screen. The middle of three small windows to its left is an “Overview” showing how the area depicted on the Main Map fits into a larger area. This feature proved very helpful.
The obvious first test for Select Street was to see how well and how quickly the reviewer could zoom in on where he was at the moment. Select Street easily passed this test.
Clicking on the approximate location of Port Townsend, up in the beautiful Northwest, caused the Main Map to re‐center itself, revealing a lot of blue ocean and a bit of Alaska. One touch of a “Zoom Button” moved to a map of the Northwest only. Two more touches got us to what a nearby menu selection listed as the “State” level. Opening the menu revealed we had started at the National level, and then moved through Regional and Multistate levels. We had Midstate, County, City Overview, City Metro, Street, and Detail levels yet to go.
Trying the City Overview level immediately got us too far to the west; but a few centering clicks got us to the middle of downtown Port Townsend. We then moved to the Street level and could see our exact location.
At home the next day, the reviewer’s eleven‐year‐old computer games expert was shown the schools in his home town, using “Listings” and “Places” buttons. Clicking and dragging a house from a wide selection of symbols in a second small window on the left side of the screen, he added this icon to the map. The third such window displays text information, like addresses, which one can fill in, as well. Maps can then be printed or downloaded.
Our youngster easily located the school he had attended first grade in California. He neither wanted nor needed parental help. Clearly this product could be used in education, though it lacks a lot of the information about things other than streets that would be included for this kind of use. Our expert kept himself entertained with it for several hours.
More businesslike applications of this product are easy to imagine, especially if it were used along with something like ProCD’s companion Select Phone ‐ for example, the production of “walking lists” for use in political campaigns. Using lists of people’s names and phone numbers along streets given by these other products, anyone could produce easily updated useful precinct maps for use by volunteers. But maps just locating the homes of Boy Scouts in a troop would save much parent time.
The only glitches this reviewer found on first inspection were minor. Railroads that now exist only as rights of way are sometimes shown on a map. Such things are probably unavoidable and don’t cause much harm. When he tried to load the product on a machine already having Select Phone installed, the program could not be located. Setting to a different directory for installation solved the problem. An unexpected plus was how well the program ran on the reviewer’s 386 machine at home.
