So i’ve been a bit late taking a look at the new Mapinfo Professional v9.5. With the consistent dissapointment towards the consumption of OGC standards in commercial apps I wasn’t holding my breath … but wait a sec, it did work and it worked damn well. I mean, it worked flawlessly; updates, inserts, deletes, lock support and it also comes complete with a semi-intelligent conflict manager.
A few more suggestions to improve things further (for anyone listening~) …
- Add HTTP compression handling. Huge performance gains with the transfer of features and its really a no brainer to enable in any http library.
- I am by no means a “Mapinfo Master” ™, but it would be great to enable an automated WFS Table refresh especially if you are retrieving features based on CURRENT_MAPPER. I guess the CTRL+F5 shortcut makes it easy-ish … but i certainly found myself wondering whether i had retrieved the features or not and ended up just sending unnecessary requests.
- If a transaction is successful, give me some kind of alert. Alerting only when it fails does not instill much confidence whether my long edit session went through or not (even after refreshing)
- It would be fantastic to add helpful warning messages when performance drops. I’d imagine most users would skim over the maxfeatures and column / row filters and just add the layer.
If the first request takes 5 minutes and Mapinfo tells me i just retrieved 4000 poly features totalling 10mb and it kindly directed me to the WFS how-to, i’d be more inclined to see what the filtering options were all about 
So there’s no WFS1.1 support … but i’m still trying to get my head around handling the axis order issue and are more than happy to let sleeping dogs lie … at least for the moment. I only had time to test against our Geoserver installs, but it certainly seems tested against many other apps including Cadcorp, Ionic & Mapinfo. Geoserver specific here, but the advanced security in 1.6.x works very well with the bundled support for basic authentication.
Finally…
Wow, big news.
Leica Geosystems Geospatial Imaging Acquires ER Mapper
I thought it was initially a joke when Jeff posted it a second ago. No release on ERMapper site, nothing on DirectionsMag … but i managed to find the hot-off-the-press feed above.
The merger makes sense but i’d hate to see the fella’s move off shore. We may be a little off the beaten track here in Perth but we certainly seem to have the brains.
All the best to the ERMapper crew. Hopefully the transition can be a smooth one (so i can still send those annoying feature requests)
It doesn’t seem as though the usual suspects picked up on this, but Openlayers is now officially at v2.0
The OpenLayers development team is proud to announce the release of
OpenLayers 2.0.
OpenLayers makes it easy to put a dynamic map in any web page. It can
display map tiles and markers loaded from any source. OpenLayers is
completely free, Open Source JavaScript, released under the BSD License.
This new release of OpenLayers supports a number of new layer types,
including support for Virtual Earth, Google, and more, alongside WMS,
WFS, KaMap, and GeoRSS.
The main development crew including Chris Schmidt certainly brings new meaning to “release early, release often”. Check out the examples for some ideas of what this js library is capable of.
If you’re wanting a client you can set up in 10 seconds, requires little configuration, has no serverside component and consumes a variety of data services .. this is for you! Watch the next release for some funky new canvas code too
Seems as though Google Maps has finally integrated the PSMA dataset. Just had a quick look and the data seems to be fairly recent.
I feel sorry for the zoomin guys as no doubt their target audience has all but dissappeared over night (until of course businesses read googles licencing arrangements :)).
Has anyone been able to get routing working? Seems as though its not accepting any kind of local address i throw at it.
Overall i’m not too impressed, but maybe thats because i have access to this sort of data all the time. It certainly will be interesting to see what sort of local “mashups” (god i hate that word) are created.
via geblog
Recent Comments