Looking forward to the delivery of version 9, I decided to look at the
available documentation.
After having read the release notes, I think I will wait for the first
service pack which ought to come pretty soon.
Im my view, the reported known problems of version 9 fall into three categories.
1 Licensing and installation problems.
It seems that PB Mapinfo have adapted a new licensing scheme, and that
this causes a number of problems. This is counter-productive and
user-unfriendly, and uncalled for.
However, concurrent licensing seemed interesting. But note that the
cost for _one_ concurrent license equals _four_ standalone licenses.
2 Windows Vista problems.
Some installation problems seems Vista-related but there are also
other Vista-related issues. Surely Windows Vista was available during
the beta phase of MI Pro 9, so that these bugs could have been ironed
out?
3 Universal Translator problems
Again, these problems seems to be related to Safe Software using
outdated MI libraries for the MapInfo flavor of FME. PB Mapinfo and
Safe Software needs to get together on this, so that their software is
synchronized. I do not know how the GUI for UT looks in v9 but hope
for a more modern interface than in 8.5 and older versions. It is
still like Windows 3.1 or thereabouts.
I have of course downloaded MB 9 (sour - I bought MB 8.5 less than a
year ago and paid full price) but will postpone use of it until the
compatibility issues are cleared.
Then I went to look for Proviewer 9, which appears to be up for
download on the MI homepage. But that is bogus, what you get is
Proviewer 8.5.
Funny thing though, it says that MapInfo Professional v9.0 is a
requirement for downloading PV 9. As I don't have that, maybe that is
why I get PV 8.5 instead ( I have MI Pro 8.5).
How about you early adopters who run MI Pro 9 already - is the above
of minor consequence, or sufficient reason for postponing an upgrade?
Regards, Mats.E
We are being asked to expand the functionality of what we do considerably,
and increasing will require better form handling.
I was hanging my hat on a .NET version of MapInfo Pro. For the last 5 years
I have been telling them I will move when MIPro goes to .NET
The question is, If someone was going pay to redevelop the whole suite of
products, what would we do it in?
Java/ MapX?
Java Client/ MapExtreme (but they want to be able to work unconnected
sometimes)
MapGuide?
UDig?
Comments welcome please?
-------------------------------------------
Robert Crossley
Agtrix P/L Australia
Far Southern Queensland Office:
Unit 6, 2 Bonanza Drive
Billinudgel NSW 2483
AUSTRALIA
Postal:
PO Box 63
New Brighton 2483
P: 61 2 6680 1309
F: 61 2 6680 5214
E: rob...@agtrix.com
W: www.agtrix.com
Brisbane Office:
109 Milsom St
Cooparoo 4151
Queensland
P: 61 7 3843 3363
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9:56 AM
I installed 9.0 on Win XP and had no problems so far.
Licensing worked without problems. Most vendors do licensing like that
today. Let us see how it is handled, in any case as license is per user,
one should be allowed to license it on several machines (such as on the
desktop and on the laptop).
UT: The "UT" now is built in partly as UT as it was and partly as File /
Open Universal Data (where you get the usual FME GUI). If you have FME
installed, you can use any of the formats (so I could i.e. open a
PostGIS layer, read only of course). FME supports two kind of MapInfo
TAB, one based on MiTAB (Open Source) and one based on MFAL (MapInfo
File Access Library). I do not see problems with either.
Vista: I had Vista installed on a machine, however I had many problems
with all kind of software so that I went back to XP ... Better to wait
for SP1 of Vista ...
Mit freundlichem Gruss / Best Regards
Flavio Hendry
----------------------------------------------------------------
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TYDAC MapServer: http://www.mapserver.ch
----------------------------------------------------------------
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#### #### Geographic Information Solutions
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My chief concerns are about Mats' first point (We seldom use the Universal
Translator, Vista seems unlikely to happen for us and we seem to have had
MapBasic since the year dot).
On concurrency - we have over 300 licences and it is quite common for up to
half of them to be in use at the same time so it seems to me that we are
unlikely to want to go down that route at present.
It was only yesterday that (having been on leave) I got round to installing
Version 9. I am wondering whether we may have difficulty in the future when
we install and try to activate a licence which is a reinstallation on a
rebuilt PC - or where the user has a new PC and the old one has been removed
before we have chance to uninstall. It may appear to PB MapInfo that we are
installing a greater number of licences than we actually hold!
Sue
Susan D Beetlestone
Uwch Swyddog GIS Corfforaethol ac ALO/Senior Corporate GIS Officer & ALO
Cyngor Sir Powys/Powys County Council
Uned Ymchwil a Gwybodaeth/Research & Information Unit
Swyddfeydd Sant Ioan/St John's Offices
Llandrindod Wells
Powys
LD1 5ES
Tel 01597 827592
e-mail sus...@powys.gov.uk
-----------------------------------------
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Dear All,
I believe this has been clarified by MapInfo already as follows:
MapInfo will not unreasonably refuse a request to transfer a license to another PC, despite what it might say about 2 changes only. This may or may not mean a call as opposed to just connecting to the server as it is not clear if their system is set up to block any more than two requests.
The purpose of limiting it a little is that if you could transfer without any limit why buy one of the new floating licenses for three times the price.
If you have a laptop and a PC then you can install MapInfo twice on the basis that you are only going to be using one at any one time and thus technically still a single user.
Hope this helps,
Tim
Dr Tim Rideout
Director
Half Price SkyView Posters at http://xyzmaps.com/acatalog/skyview_posters.html
Visit XYZ at InterGeo Leipzig Sept 2007 and Frankfurt Book Fair Oct 10-14th 2007
The XYZ Digital Map Company
Unit 9 Phase 2 Hardengreen Business Park
Dalhousie Road, Dalkeith
EH22 3NX, Scotland, Europe
Tel: +44 131 454 0426
Fax: +44 131 454 0443
Mobile: +44 7766 825937
Email: tim.r...@xyzmaps.com
Web: www.xyzmaps.com
<BR
The only issue we have had so far with 9.0 is the change from date to date/time in the file structure. It is more problematic when using linked DBMS tables it appears.
The issue arises primarily when refreshing a linked DBMS table such as a spatialware or standard sql point file. The version stamp on the tab file changes to 900. Older versions of MI Pro or Proviewer cannot access the tab files afterwards.
We have used a few workarounds in mapbasic scripts that modify the field to date and version to 300 upon committing.
Licensing was not really a problem on our installs.
Hope this helps someone.
Mike Osbourn
What a nice debate. Let me add a few notes:
* Cost of concurrent licenses v single use
CMC International advertised these prices on this list june 18
MapInfo Professional 9.0 Single User $1,098.00
MapInfo Professional 9.0 Concurrent User $3,999.00
which is 3.64 times the price and closer to four times than to three.
OK so I rounded the estimate upwards perhaps too much. But on those figures.
I haven't seen any other price lists.
* Licensing policies.
I think t's a question of attitude, from the software vendor to their customers.
Bentley Systems who make MicroStation have recently introduced a
system they call trust licensing. I quote from a white paper on the
subject:
"Bentley, like most software vendors, is serious about improving the
process of protecting
against the loss of its own intellectual property. Just as
importantly, though, Bentley is
serious about protecting against the loss of its own users' ability
and right to access their
own intellectual property: their design data /.../ Bentley's focus for
license management with SELECT Server XM Edition is liberation rather
than restriction."
In short, this means that the license server always issues a license,
even if the usage temporarlily exceeds the number of owned licenses.
This enables the users to always have access to critical software on a
trust basis.
Just as we trust MapInfo by buying their software, they should trust
our use of it.
And it seems correct that the licensing problems depend more on
Windows Vista than on MapInfo, but it is MapInfos responsibility to
ensure that their software works on all certified platforms (or
perhaps version 9 isn't Vista certified?)
* UT woes
I should have been more specific: the worst problem still persists,
that swedish indexed tab files cannot be translated. But it has been
claimed that the MITAB libraries do work better. Maybe we should ask
Safe Software to compile a UT version on those libraries for us
swedes?
Have a nice weekend, all
Mats.E
2007/7/27, o...@nc.rr.com <o...@nc.rr.com>:
Asking what language and tools one would use to develop their next
generation of spatially-enabled applications is begging for lots of
biased opinion, but I've been looking down this road too. I expect that
MapBasic will be with us for the foreseeable future, so I plan to
continue to use it and MapInfo for developing desktop applications.
But the siren call of Internet is making me look hard at the future, and
that's not going to be MapBasic. So I've tried C# and MapXtreme and
that's not bad, but to deploy applications based on this over the
Internet is expensive, so it's a viable options for only for the largest
applications. In fact, I've been sort of appalled at the prices of
software licenses and their restrictive conditions, so I'm exploring the
Open Source alternatives.
I've set up a collection of tools based on MapServer (map display) and
PostgerSQL with the PostGIS and GEOS extensions (for spatially-enabled
database management), into which I've included support libraries GDAL,
OGR and MITAB (for GIS file conversion and MapInfo TAB support) and
PROJ4 (for map projection support). For languages, I'm experimenting
with PHP mapscript, Perl (PL/pgSQL, PostgreSQL's scripting language),
and javascript.
It may seem like a lot to get a grip on, but all this does pretty much
work well together, and to do all the things I might want to do, I need
software that can do a lot. I'm finding that MapServer and PostgreSQL
seem to be as good as MapXtreme and Oracle or SQL Server, and certainly
better than ArcIMS, and they don't cost me a penny for licensing and
there's no restrictions on deploying applications using them (except for
conditions set by the Open Source GPL license).
The one weak area I see is in support for building a good user
interface. Writing web-based forms in HTML is a real pain, and the
selection of web form controls is limited (noticeably absent are
database grids), and there's a lack of control event triggers. Probably
all fixable with some javascript, but that's not in my skill set yet.
But I'm still on the learning curve, and working on a pilot for a large
application, so the jury's still out, but so far this route looks pretty
viable. It's also interesting to see who's showing up on the
MAPSERVER_USERS and PostGIS mailing lists -- I see a lot of familiar
MapInfo-L names!
- Bill Thoen
The prices are already stiff for me, and the sole reason I don't keep up
with every single upgrade that comes out. In recent years, the bug fixes and
new features haven't warranted the high cost of upgraded.
Furthermore, purchasing my own license, I have no intention, nor desire, no
way-no how, of letting a "buddy have a copy". I've made several people mad
over the years because I wouldn't "burn them a copy of my mapping software".
HELL!!! I have a hard enough time paying for it myself, darned if I'm gonna
burn copys for "buddys"!!!
I still give PBMI benefit of the doubt, I'm sure they could understand, it
would be easy for someone who uses Mapinfo such as I may have a number of
occasions in one year to have to reinstall. In the past 12 months, I've
installed or reinstalled 3 times, one after a serous crash, one on a new PC,
the most recently after a hard drive failure I attribute to using my laptop
in a vehicle day in and day out. Let's not forget installing it on a hard
drive you have Windows 2000 running on, installed on another hard drive
running XP, there's a total of five installs in a 12 month span for the
single individual and on only two different machines, the privous one taken
out of service!
I'm hoping and planning on upgrading to 9 by or before September, should
this license issue be as bad as everyone is elluding to, it will be my last
upgrade. I'm not made out of money, and have yet to find a nursery what
sells money trees!
David Reid
-----Original Message-----
From: mapi...@googlegroups.com [mailto:mapi...@googlegroups.com] On
Bill,
We are doing a lot with that at present with PostGIS and MapServer and are very impressed. They are both very mature projects.
For a client control, take a look at the pmapper project with mapserver (www.pmapper.net). BTW, pmappers live demos don't seem to work on their site, but the references to sites in their gallery do. http://www.pmapper.net/gallery.shtml
I did a google maps like Active X about 6 years ago for one client (using MapServer as a rendering engine and ER Mapper to stream and cache underlying images for speed). With the new security levels imposed by browsers now, you generally have to be quite determined to get a mapping site which uses installed Active X or applets. We have since reproduced this with pmapper (except for the streaming images) which uses no active X or installed applets. PMapper uses pure html and javascript and ajax to give similar performance. It uses PHP on the back end. You can customise its interface and also add your own plug ins as well. And for the really serious, you can edit the core code.
The whole system works really well.
I am looking for something to work off line as well as on-line though and mapinfo's ability to work with Oracle or Spatialware and use downloaded data while off-line but then reconciling back to the server is attractive.
R
-------------------------------------------
Robert Crossley
Agtrix P/L Australia
Far Southern Queensland Office:
Unit 6, 2 Bonanza Drive
Billinudgel NSW 2483
AUSTRALIA
Postal:
PO Box 63
New Brighton 2483
P: 61 2 6680 1309
F: 61 2 6680 5214
Brisbane Office:
109 Milsom St
Cooparoo 4151
Queensland
P: 61 7 3843 3363
-----Original Message-----
From: mapi...@googlegroups.com [mailto:mapi...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf
Of Bill Thoen
Sent: Saturday, 28 July 2007 2:01 AM
To: mapi...@googlegroups.com
No virus found in this incoming message.
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So how would that work when a machne has had a hard disk crash ??
Are we supposed to uninstall the software just before the disk fails?
Can't say I'm impressed by version 9 at all so far, if anything I'm
more and more persuaded that this upgrade is more of a downgrade. Loss
of backward compatability, increased price, more restrictive
licencing, sonds like a recipe to alienate customers, not attract
them.
Mr Grumpy.
(Gentreau)
On Jul 27, 3:05 pm, "James Stott" <jamessto...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Sue,
>
> According to the manual, if you need to transfer MapInfo (because you
> rebuild or get a new machine) you should 'transfer' your license to MapInfo
> before you remove the software. This then puts the license back on MapInfos
> license server and you can then use that license again on the new machine.
>
> The one thing from the manual that I have a query about is that it states:
>
> "Your organization is limited to two license transfers per year, regardless
> of the number of licenses"
>
> Does this mean you can only do this process twice no matter how many
> licenses you have?
>
> James
>
> > e-mail susa...@powys.gov.uk
> > Council.- Hide quoted text -
>
> - Show quoted text -
> Hi All!
> Looking forward to the delivery of version 9, I decided to look at the
> available documentation.
> After having read the release notes, I think I will wait for the first
> service pack which ought to come pretty soon.
> Im my view, the reported known problems of version 9 fall into three
> categories.
> 1 Licensing and installation problems.
> It seems that PB Mapinfo have adapted a new licensing scheme, and that
> this causes a number of problems. This is counter-productive and
> user-unfriendly, and uncalled for.
> However, concurrent licensing seemed interesting. But note that the
> cost for _one_ concurrent license equals _four_ standalone licenses.
I work for an organisation of 4000 employees, of which approximately
800 have MapInfo installed.
Naturally, we have a firewall controlling access to the internet.
MapInfo 9 cannot get through the firewall to access the liscence
server.
nick
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Hi all,
This hypothetical question is no longer hypothetical, so we are investigating options fo redveloping a large MapBasic program into a better programming environment.
So, for the development of our existing MapBasic apps, we are leaning towards the idea of a .NET thick client application that incorporates fairly sophisticated GIS functionailty. The funding clients are microsoft ortientated and already have invested in Spatialware. A mapinfo based solution would be most appropriate.
MapExtreme obviously needs to be investigated. I have heard that the pricing regime for MapExtreme is fairly extreme. Is this correct? This industry has already invested a fair amount into MapInfo. A number of clients will reject moving to the new system if the set up cost is too high.
Any stories to relate on its applicability to develop desktop applications that will enable spatial object editing and manipulation, high quality map production, or ability to work disconnected from a server and reconcile with Spatial databases like Spatialware or Oracle (as MIPro can).
In answer to Bill's comment:
Bill thoen said:
>Is it out of the question to load the Apache and MapServer servers on
>those machines? That way you can connect to http://localhost and it
>looks no different than if you were online ('cept the performance is as
>fast as a local machine can be.)
Bill, we are in fact looking at this option for certain applications, but only where we are supplying a purpose configured computer.
I think the idea of using this as an alternative to a GIS app may be impractical in most situations as (1) can you imagine telling an IT department that you must install appache, php etc etc on individual desktops to run our mapping app? (we can't even get some of them to install java Runtime), and (2) web apps on the main part do not allow snapping and selection interactivity that you need for good editing interaction. You would have to write all of that stuff yourself.
We are, however, investigating this option for a vehicle mounted touch screen device that has been built and configured for the sole purpose of running a simple GIS enabled app. The current thread on GPS for PDA's is interesting for me as well. MapServer has the advantage of integrating well with PostGIS, and thus has the potential for using database reconciliation to reconcile data with a central server. It may come to nothing though.
R
-----Original Message-----
From: mapi...@googlegroups.com
[mailto:mapi...@googlegroups.com] On
Behalf Of Bill Thoen
Sent: Saturday, 28 July 2007 8:30 AM
To: mapi...@googlegroups.com
Subject: [MI-L] Re: Hypothetical Question on Programming Future.
robert crossley wrote:
No virus found in this incoming message.
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One other option is worth considering. The main reason we want to move off Mapbasic is the poor dialogs available (no control arrays, no programatical manipulation of controls, difficult event handling).
How difficult would it to continue with a MapBasic app, and use something like .NET to create forms that the base data is provided from MapInfo, and the results passed back to MI. Perhaps even while the dialog is open?
We could then continue to use the MapBasic code for stuff like map production (does MapExtreme have a layout object?)
I noticed Ian Tidy had mentioned this.
R
-------------------------------------------
Robert Crossley
Agtrix P/L Australia
Far Southern Queensland Office:
Unit 6, 2 Bonanza Drive
Billinudgel NSW 2483
AUSTRALIA
Postal:
PO Box 63
New Brighton 2483
P: 61 2 6680 1309
F: 61 2 6680 5214
28°30'14.81"S
153°31'41.79"E
Brisbane Office:
109 Milsom St
Cooparoo 4151
Queensland
P: 61 7 3843 3363
Thanks for the detail. Your response strikes a chord with me as I have had a similar involvement with MapInfo. I had been hanging my hat on Project Grande for the last few years as well as my direction forward, and now I have to reevaluate where to go.
I have an added issue in that my application space is agriculture, and none of the features like geocoding mean anything to us. Much of MapInfos functionality developed for business application does give us much additional functionality at all. We are in a space where Arc now competes very well.
Over my time, MapInfo has become a corporate business, and the pimply faced kids I used to work with are now regional managers. Its more nimble low cost competitors are biting at its heels, and they have their evangelists saying look at all you can do with product X for not as much money as MapInfo. That used to be MapInfo’s space. ArcInfo still says its better (some things never change), but now they actually have a product that competes directly with MapInfo Pro.
Not only have the products evolved, however, my clients have gone from a few guys using a mapping package to being spatially enabled corporate data managers. Mapping is just part of their business. They are not hick aggies, but their business systems are recognized as cutting edge in the wider business community. Whatever systems we develop now have to work in a corporate environment. MapInfo is very good at that. Perhaps we have to move with them, and so MapExtreme has to be a strong contenter. Then again, maybe we don’t. I will look at Manifold again.
Thanks for the thoughts.
r
-------------------------------------------
Robert Crossley
Agtrix P/L Australia
Far Southern Queensland Office:
Unit 6, 2 Bonanza Drive
Billinudgel NSW 2483
AUSTRALIA
Postal:
PO Box 63
New Brighton 2483
P: 61 2 6680 1309
F: 61 2 6680 5214
28°30'14.81"S
153°31'41.79"E
Brisbane Office:
109 Milsom St
Cooparoo 4151
Queensland
P: 61 7 3843 3363
I wish to add my comments on Jon's essay :)
I too have been not been impressed with "the major improvements" in each release of MapInfo ... it certainly does not justify the big upgrade price increases they ask. I remember a few comments on MapInfo-L over the years saying that people are still happy with version 6.5 .....
The new features in version 9.0 can be counted on one-hand, possibly two (depending on what you consider useful or a major improvement)
Earlier this year, I invested in ArcGIS 9.2 and already there have been three service pack releases (with new added features in each). I have already started to create and migrate some clients data across to personal geodatabases. Why? Because for my work, there is much more functionality in the ArcGIS environment.
I also use Encom's Discover and they too have had two major releases in the past year. The latest one (v 9.0, out today) has a whole swag of major useful improvements (at a cheaper annual maintenance fee than MapInfo's) http://web2.encom.com.au/pdfs/DiscoverAdvancesSheet_%209.0.14.pdf
The main reasons I stay with MapInfo is because of:
1) The Discover add-on (for geological-related work).
2) I also am on the maintenance plan so that I can stay current with "the new features" (only because I give one-on-one training in MapInfo and thus have to stay current)
MapInfo Professional needs a good shakeup to bring it into the current century. I've used it for over 13 years, and the interface hasn't changed, and several required improvements (that I've posted on both the wish list and discussed on MapInfo-L) have never eventuated.
Get back to me in a year. I expect to be better skilled with my ArcGIS 9.2 (probably 10 by then) and then may really be leading the charge advising clients to adopt ESRI over MapInfo.
Regards,
Bill
I wish to add my comments on Jon's essay :)
I too have been not been impressed with "the major improvements" in each release of MapInfo ... it certainly does not justify the big upgrade price increases they ask. I remember a few comments on MapInfo-L over the years saying that people are still happy with version 6.5 .....
The new features in version 9.0 can be counted on one-hand, possibly two (depending on what you consider useful or a major improvement)
Earlier this year, I invested in ArcGIS 9.2 and already there have been three service pack releases (with new added features in each). I have already started to create and migrate some clients data across to personal geodatabases. Why? Because for my work, there is much more functionality in the ArcGIS environment.
I also use Encom's Discover and they too have had two major releases in the past year. The latest one (v 9.0, out today) has a whole swag of major useful improvements (at a cheaper annual maintenance fee than MapInfo's) http://web2.encom.com.au/pdfs/DiscoverAdvancesSheet_%209.0.14.pdf
The main reasons I stay with MapInfo is because of:
1) The Discover add-on (for geological-related work).
2) I also am on the maintenance plan so that I can stay current with "the new features" (only because I give one-on-one training in MapInfo and thus have to stay current)
MapInfo Professional needs a good shakeup to bring it into the current century. I've used it for over 13 years, and the interface hasn't changed, and several required improvements (that I've posted on both the wish list and discussed on MapInfo-L) have never eventuated.
Get back to me in a year. I expect to be better skilled with my ArcGIS 9.2 (probably 10 by then) and then may really be leading the charge advising clients to adopt ESRI over MapInfo.
Regards,
Bill
I'm a long-ago frequent MapInfo-L contributor, engrossed by the
discussion.
(I created "Useful Resources for MapInfo Users and All People who Love
Maps," in the 1990s, but haven't updated it for years.)
I am giving Manifold a serious whirl.
If you join a Manifold Google Group, you'll be the third member: So
far I've found one other Manifold person.
http://groups.google.com/group/manifold/
(The title says Mid-Atlantic, but you're welcome to join regardless of
where you use Manifold.)
There's a Manifold-owned web forum that's very helpful--the central
resource, but I miss more open-ended discussion.
Hoping to connect,
Margie Roswell
http://manifolder.wordpress.com
(Less wordy than most blogs--basically just high-quality links)
On Aug 3, 12:53 am, "Jon Gramm" <jbgr...@gmail.com> wrote:
> ...
> So far Manifold takes the middle ground...
> ...