Jos Atlas of GB

Atlases on CD-ROM tend to be better at pretty pictures than maps, so it was with some excitement that I loaded the Ordnance Survey Interactive Atlas of Great Britain. Perhaps I was too excited, though, because the maps were a disappointment. The supporting material is good. You can zoom around Britain using pretty controls (shame it wonÆt go bigger than VGA though), and take maps into greater detail from 1:6,000,000 to 1:25,000, but thatÆs where it stops, at the same sort of scale as a typical motoring atlas. It whets the appetite, but you want more. At the very least IÆd like to be able to go to 1:50,000 (the old 1 inch to a mile), and by preference to zoom in to the beautifully detailed pathfinder maps at 1:25,000. Even so, there are some fun details, with multimedia provided by photographs, videos, small area detailed maps and four dramatic if inflexible 3D models. There is also geographical information, a quiz and a map skills section to introduce the basics of map reading. The quiz is actually easier than finding your way around the detailed maps in the multimedia layer, which are fiendishly hard to manipulate.

Overall - Road atlas maps with multimedia goodies prove rather disappointing. Priced around ú40 in the UK. Windows CD. Distributed by Attica. Ordnance Survey web site is http://www.ordsvy.gov.uk/