The latest has some serious speed ups, and cleans up a few outstanding issues that really needed to be taken care of:
3.17 – [10/6/07]
Major speedup in track drawing
Major speedup when large numbers of waypoints are displayed
Added Lodging, Motel and Library to supported graphical symbols
(for Adventure Cycling data)
Fixed bug causing batch/box downloads to miss tiles when
part of the download area was already downloaded
Fixed .kml export with special characters in filenames (& etc)
Both of the speedups won't be hugely noticeable unless you've got a fair number of tracks (or MANY waypoints) loaded. There was a clipping problem on the track drawing so that even if you only were currently viewing one very small track, it would be as slow as if you were drawing all tracks you had loaded.
The waypoint thing is a bit different -- if there are too many waypoints on the screen TF will simply not draw them on every refresh. So when panning or zooming, for instance, the text is just not shown. GE and other programs do this as well -- drawing too much text is just too slow for real time map movement. The effect can be a little annoying, but mega slow map refresh is much more annoying, trust me!
The load maps tool error was a pretty serious one - it was introduced in one of the more recent TF versions. The gist is this - if you were downloading a totally new area, it works fine. But if you already have part of that area downloaded, you would miss some new tiles in that area. Definitely not cool - users need to be able to trust that the program has downloaded all (active) tiles within the download area once it says "finished." That should be the case now.
As always, any comments or problems, post or email us.
Thanks.
