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As I wrote in my posts about our campervan trip through Europe, one of the biggest challenges we had was lack of route planning support for Garmin products on the Mac. Running MapSource with VirtualPC worked okay but the lack of USB support meant that uploads were painfully slow and still the maps did not seem to upload correctly as on-the-fly route calculation did not seem to work. Despite this, the VirtualPC bandaid got us through a big chunk of Western Europe without major incident.

A couple of years back I was talking to legendary adventure rider Helge Pedersen during a Morton’s BMW event in Fredericksburg, VA about the dificulties of interfacing Garmin products with the Mac. Helge pointed out that Garmin would soon be rolling out Mac software. It took a while but the Mac software from Garmin has started to trickle out slowly.

Recently, my Sony VAIO died (another long story) and I was back to using a Mac almost exclusively. I tried Garmin’s MapInstall to download my maps into my GPSMAP 276C and it worked okay but I beamoned the fact that I could not do any route planning on the computer (a task made much easier with a full keyboard and larger screen).

Some time later I became aware of Garmin’s Project BobCat, which is billed as a way to “search for points of interest (POIs), create and organize waypoints, routes and tracks, and easily send them to your Garmin GPS.” The product is still in Beta but I downloaded it and used it to plan a route for a short fishing trip. I was expecting it to be somewhat more limited than MapSource but found that it provided the same capability with a much improved interface. I had a couple of near hang-ups but it seemed pretty stable for a Beta.

All is good, right? Eh! Wrong… Because the software is in Beta phase, it forces you to download and install any available updates so during the 4th of July weekend I was forced to upgrade to version 2.0.0.6. The upgrade completely broke my BlueChart Americas capability. BobCat will crash whenever I try to scroll through the map with a lot of detail turned on, zoom in too far or pretty much do anything I really need to plan a route. What’s worse is that I cannot even seem to use MapManager anymore to re-convert and re-install the maps.

So, is Project BobCat the much-awaited solution for trip planning with Garmin product’s on the Mac? I’ll reserve my judgement for after I get my BlueChart working again.