An alternative view of GIS from a Manifold GIS user, formerly known as Manifold User Blog
Well Dimitri’s replies on this thread on Georeference has cleared up a few confusions misconceptions I and many others had about the release of Manifold 9.0. It basically boils down to:
Both the release date for end of the first half of 2009 and the $50/$100 upgrade price, announced on the Manifold website, was for a canned proposed add-on for enhanced CUDA features for Manifold 8.0.
There has been no official announcement of when 9.0 will be released and what it might cost.
There happy now?
No, this is not a post about Manifold, but a post on how a GIS company who appears to be having stagnant sales can make their current users even more disheartened about their product. PB MapInfo have announced in North America that if you intend to upgrade, purchase MapInfo 10 it is now mandatory to purchase a maintenance package. The MapInfo User Group has been discussing the issue and they’re not a happy bunch.
Even though I’ve never used paid for support from Manifold.net I prefer their model of only paying for support when you need it – what a novel concept! With MapInfo following ESRI’s support model this isn’t going to enamour existing and new users. If I didn’t know about Manifold, I don’t see any reason why I wouldn’t choose ArcGIS over MapInfo as the pricing isn’t much of difference anymore.
Suffice to say I won’t be taking up the repeated requests from MapInfo’s sales team to upgrade my copy of MapInfo 7.0.
Update: Looks like it is only the US that is getting nailed with the mandatory support, MATS as PB MapInfo calls it. Here’s a detailed list of US pricing for new/upgrades purchases, plus MATS costs.
I was getting bored with new old blog title, I’ve reinstated the original title, now with more perspective as a current ArcGIS and Manifold user – even if it sounds like you get a pot of strawberry preserve from ESRI.
I have been working on a large impermeability study project, which I took over from a colleague from one of our US offices. The project had been prepared using an ESRI file geodatabase. Thankfully all of the creation of the various impermeable surfaces (roofs, parking, sidewalks, etc.) had been completed before I got involved. My part of the project was to merge the impermeable data with various other boundaries representing subcatchments, land use and montoring areas to create a final SHP file that had data columns for each subcatchment with area totals for each type of impermeable surface.
I decided to use Manifold’s Topology Overlay command to run through the merging of each of the different data sets. Even though this took several runs to achieve the final output required, this was so easily accomplished it didn’t enter my mind to investigate alternatives using SQL or the ArcGIS Join Data method.
The part of the project where I had a problems was with the permeable feature class in the file geodatabase – when I tried to use ArcCatalog to convert to SHP, ArcCatalog refused to complete the process, even though the progress bar shot to 100% complete, resulting in a zero object SHP file. After investigating the attribute table I determined that this was a single multi-part polygon that covered the entire study area. To resolve the issue I used the Advanced Editing Explode tool on a copy of the polygon feature class and it exported successfully. I imported the permeable SHP file into Manifold and ran the Topology Overlay command to determine the permeable area totals for each subcatchment.
All that’s left now is some QA/QC to make sure I haven’t messed up along the way, but I’m quite confident that once again the Manifold way has achieved another of the classic GIS tasks simply and without issue.
As for the ArcGIS export multi-part polygon to SHP problem lets put that in the usual ‘ESRI makes us jump through hoops’ folder.
Another Manifold user has started blogging: check out Eandelin’s The Mobile Mapper musings on Manifold, mobile mapping and LiDAR. There’s a post on the recent west coast Manifold user meeting, interestingly he states Manifold 9 will be released in August now, which means it has slipped back a month or so.
Will be interesting seeing his postings on the performance of Manifold using LiDAR data, which can be processor and memory intensive.
Continuing the Manifold 9 theme – another new feature to be added is the support of linking to SHP files. This feature was (unofficially) first announced in one of the usually lively debates about Manifold’s quirks when it exports to SHP.
Manifold has always had the ability to import/export to SHP, but this new feature will streamline joint Manifold and ArcGIS projects where a user is having to use Manifold to add data based upon it’s many spatial and data analyses functions; rather than overwriting SHP files we will now have the choice to update the existing SHP file directly. It will be interesting to see how Manifold performs with some larger data stored as SHP format, especially since Manifold.net has always decried the inefficiencies of the legacy format.
One problem I have with Manifold and SHP files is the inability of ArcGIS 9.3 to correctly interpret Manifold generated PRJ files; I don’t even attempt it anymore and use ArcGIS to assign projections. For Manifold users who don’t have access to ArcGIS I can see this being an issue, but it’s a relatively painless process for Arc users who receive the SHP files to quickly assign the correct projection, if they need to at all, as long as the unassigned SHP files use the same projection as the dataframe they will come in fine. I’d be a rich man if I received a dime for every set of SHP files that came without any PRJ files from other ArcGIS users.
I hope there are a few other little nuggets like this feature that will surprise me once I get to use Manifold 9.
Edit: I can see some ArchaicGIS users are already making fun out of this feature, when’s ESRI going to allow connections to DBMS without no stinking middleware? Now that’s software purposely being locked in the dark ages.
It’s been a bit quiet on the Manifold news front of late, but there are signs that Manifold.net are turning up the heat in preparation of the release of Manifold 9. Last weeks press release gave out some info on upcoming release. I missed the ISP Planet interview with Dimitri Rotow, Manifold Product Manager from last month.
There’s also another Manifold user who has started to blog – Patrick Weber’s Spatial Knowledge, Patrick is a regular at Georeference and is the guy who set up the Manifold Wiki Manipedia. His post on the unholy alliance of Manifold and R to incorporate R’s statistical capabilities seamlessly inside Manifold is excellent. I’ll be adding Spatial Knowledge to my blogs to read, I just hope Patrick can post a bit more frequently than some other Manifold bloggers.
The usually secretive guys from Manifold.net have put out a new press release, which reveals that the next version will have a serious amount of CUDA enabled features:
How is the new technology different from the CUDA support in Manifold’s existing Release 8 GIS product? – Manifold’s Release 8 GIS product was the first and is still the only GIS product to use NVIDIA CUDA for breathtaking speed increases, but it does so in a limited way. Manifold Release 8 provides almost three dozen CUDA-enabled functions for computations within an optional surface transform dialog. The new technology previewed in London runs automatically within hundreds of functions as a built-in part of Manifold and scales to many thousands of GPU stream processors. It utilizes a new, deeply parallel heterogeneous parallel processing architecture to take advantage of parallel processing within multicore CPUs to service massively parallel processing within GPUs. Since Release 8, Manifold has written millions of lines of code to make the new technology possible.
They also pencilled in the approximate release date:
The new Manifold technology previewed in London will ship in the first half of 2009 and will be offered to all Manifold Release 8 licensees for an update fee between $50 and $100 per license.
A possible rise in the upgrade cost, all previous upgrades were $50 or free, but even with my reduced IT budget that won’t make much of an impact.
Manifold 9 has been in development for around two years, lets hope that the wait has been worth it.
One of the great new features of ArcGIS 9.3 is the error reporting system that has been introduced. Whenever a crash is encountered ArcGIS 9.3 will give you the ability to to send an error report to ESRI.
Says it all really. And after struggling with labelling a road layer in a clipped dataframe for an hour I have no sympathy for ArcCrud.
A couple of conferences at the beginning of the new year:
Friday, January 16th and Saturday, January 17th, 2009
University of Denver
Denver, COCome meet other users of Manifold or just come to learn more about what Manifold can do for you! Heck, this is Colorado — come a couple days early and get in some real Rocky Mountain Skiing or visit some of Denver’s other attractions. This is also the weekend of Martin Luther King day, so you may have a good opportunity for a nice long weekend!
We’re looking for presenters, but based on last year’s schedule, topics of interest will include things like:
Manifold Basics
GPS Integration
Programming with the Manifold ActiveX Control
Database Implementation
Migrating from ESRI to Manifold
Linked Drawings
Project Demonstrations
IMS DemonstrationsRegistration Fee is $50 for both days, $25 for one day.
We’re in the process of updating the web page, but wanted to get this announcement out. Keep checking back at www.gis4everyone.com/WUSMUC for updated information and registration information. (We know it still has last year’s schedule — just bear with us)
In the mean time, if you’re interested in presenting at the conference or would like more information, please contact us at information@gis4everyone.com
We’re excited to be in Denver and our meetings are graciously being hosted by the University of Denver Geography Department. They’ve got great facilities for our large group presentations as well as plenty of break out rooms, complete with projectors and wi-fi available for our use. Stay tuned for more details soon.
The Department of Geomatic Engineering, University College London, would like to invite all current Manifold GIS Users, as well as other GIS software users interested in learning more about the Manifold GIS, to join us for the third edition of the European Manifold User Meeting.
We have fixed the date in our diaries for the
16th and 17th of February 2009, at the Department of Geomatic Engineering, UCL, London, UK. Even though this means that there will be no London user meeting in 2008, this date was chosen as the best compromise for both UCL and Manifold staff. As you might have guessed, Muki and myself indeed have been too busy lately to organise a user meeting this summer. We thus agreed that given the development cycle of Manifold (update expected end of this year), Q1 2009 would give the user community the best opportunity to feedback on the new Manifold version and influence future developments past Manifold 9.0 (or whatever the next version will be called?!?).
Given that there are still some months to go before the meeting, we are only starting to plan the agenda, but as always, we will need active user involvement to make this meeting successful, be it through presentations, workshop topics to be discussed, ideas for tutorials or even organisational help! Feel free to post here in the thread ideas so that we can discuss them in the community.
As in the past meetings, Manifold representatives, including Dimitri Rotow, product manager for Manifold will be present.
If you are interested in attending this meeting and helping out, you can contact Patrick Weber at p.weber@ucl.ac.uk.
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