Garmin screws Mapsource again, but it does it faster...

So there was updates to my GPS available, and those always (nowadays anyway) work like a charm.

That was not the only thing new, also an update of Mapsource 6.14 was availale as 6.15.3

Suspicious, remembering the terrible 6.14, I did the recommended trick of preserving a copy of the 6.13.7 executable and installed the new version. Got into some stupid situation where the new version didn't want to start, but a faint memory of messages on the forums when 6.14 came around, probably 6.15 won't eat 3rd party old maps. So I started uninstalling them. Of course I managed to screw things up so I had to uninstall everything, clean the reg manually, but eventually the new version was there working as intended.

Well, intended by Garmin. It is now significantly faster than 6.14 in rendering. And you can now set the size of icons and some more nifty improvement. However it still makes the wrong project projection. Approaching the poles the distances in X direction will be infinitely longer than distances in Y. Compare it to using Google Earth and you cannot have the camera looking straight down, it always has a fxed direction, not to the face of the geoid, but orthogonal to the earth axis. 6.13 never did this, now distorsion is so ugly you cannot make any assumptions about distances nor directions when looking at the renderings. Boohoo Garmin, this so embarrassingly ugly you should be ashamed. Did your rookie developers drop out from the geography and maths lessons??? Still good your hardware guys don't mess up rendering in the devices.

Apparently you will need to have the newer Mapsource to use City Navigator 2009 Europe NT. Noteworthy is that there is new file formats, new installation locations, use of XML to describe the installation rather than keys in the register. On the plus side from this I guess comes the tremendous speedup in generating the indexes for transferring maps to the cards. Things that would take forever is now done in a few minutes. That is cool. Since Mapsource kindly allows the result to bes stored on memory cards, there is also a version circling allowing you to put it anywhere you like...