Microsoft Streets & Trips has partnered with Entertainment Online to present valuable special offers in many towns across the United States and Canada. These deals are available to you across a variety of categories, including restaurants, hotels, special events, retailers and service providers.

With the high price of fuel and the less than stellar economy, I love getting discounts and saving money wherever I travel.   When we first started working on this feature I was really wondering if there would be enough coupons available to make it worthwhile.  I had no idea how many thousands of coupons there were all over the US and Canada.  I found that browsing through the coupons in Streets & Trips and seeing their locations visually on the map is a much better experience than flipping through a physical entertainment book.

If you’ve never used Entertainment Online coupons, Streets & Trips makes it easy for you to sign up for a free trial membership. If you already use Entertainment Online coupons, you can renew your membership directly from within Streets & Trips.

Streets & Trips gives you the ability to see which Entertainment Online coupons are available for places within the geographical area that you specify. The coupons are displayed as pushpins on the map.

You can easily print the Entertainment Online coupons directly from Streets & Trips to take with you on the road so that you can save money on restaurants, hotels, and more.

Some like the speaking of street names in the spoken instructions others do not.

Some like the application to automatically re-route other do not want the original route to ever be changed.

The new Options dialog will keep everyone happy:

This is one of the first things you need to know about the 2009 version.  I was asked about this several times at the FCMA convention.

Below is a comparison between the new 2009 S&T toolbar (on top) and the toolbar from 2008 (very similar to 2007, 2006 etc).  The toolbar has been cleaned up and the buttons have doubled in size (very helpful for use while in vehicle). 

So where are the Pan and Select buttons?  They are gone! And that is a good thing.  There is no longer a need to click up on the toolbar each time you want to change tools now use LEFT mouse button to drag/pan and RIGHT click to select/draw a rectangle for zooming in or creating an AVOID AREA.

Zoom in on a specific area

1. On the map, position your mouse pointer at the upper-left corner of the area you want to zoom in on.

2. Right-click the map and drag the pointer diagonally until you've drawn a box around the area you want to enlarge.

3. To quit drawing, release the mouse button.

   If the box you've drawn isn't quite where you want it, click outside the box to make it disappear, and then redraw it.

4. Click inside the box.

Note  You can also zoom in on any area of the map by double-clicking the area and shift+double-clicking zooms out the map.

This week a few of us from the team are in Minneapolis, MN at the Family Motor Coach Association (FMCA) Convention.  It has been great to be a part of this event.  I was able to speak on a panel discussing PC Navigation software and take part in a very fruitful Q&A session that lasted a couple hours. 

3000 lucky attendees got their own copy of a 60 day trial of S&T09...fresh off the burners.  Many folks had already installed and used the new version before visiting our booth.

The feedback we have received from the FMCA attendee on the new version so far has been very positive.  I will be sharing for on features in future posts.  Most of these folks are very experienced hard core users who use it daily for months at a time logging thousands of miles in their motor coaches with S&T helping them get to their destinations along the way.

Here is a snapshot of the Streets booth before the crowds came in.  Once the doors opened I talked non-stop for 8 hours.