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.

If you had asked me after the 2008 North American conference in May if I would still be waiting to get my hands on Manifold 9.0, or even a sniff of a likely release date by Canada Day 2009 (that’s July 1st), then I would have laughed at you and taken up a bet for a beer or two. Manifold.net has prided itself on the fact that it would issue releases on a regular basis, but it’s over two years since 8.0 came out, which is a long time between releases.

I think we now need an official announcement from Manifold.net about the state of play with this release. Manifold has always said it doesn’t like to announce vaporware and release dates of upgrades are only announced when they are sure that the software is close to its final build. The problem this time around is that they did make the statement of 9.0 being released at the end of the first half of 2009 on their website, which I covered previously. Since they set a precedent with this statement, they should be at least acknowledging that this date has passed and give users some idea of how the development of this release is going.

At present users can only speculate at what is taking so long – I won’t be sharing my myriad of scenarios of the cause of the delay here. Oh alright here’s one – they’ve taken on board the cartography issues we’ve raised and have decided to attend to those items. If you want to comment on how this delay is affecting you I’d be interested to hear your views.

I’ve got to get back to my work using Manifold 8.0, which helps as it really is the greatest GIS in the world, but it would be nice to have some new Manifold toys to play with.

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’ve made a few previous comments on how I find ESRI’s various geodatabase formats confusing and overly complex. I came across a recent discussion on the PostGIS usergroup that others may be interested to read. Long time Manifold user and spatial database expert Simon Greener is a contributer and there’s good advice on how to use Manifold to extract data from ESRI geodatabases, sadly the file geodatabase is still a closed silo (unless like me you have ArcGIS to crack it open and export to SHP).

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.

At the recent Manifold UC in Denver the Manifold.net team demonstrated Manifold 9.0’s CUDA capabilities by carrying out a remote sensing operation (I’d like to know which one, but I’m guessing they’re keeping any new features under wraps until the official 9.0 roll out) on a monster of a custom machine, that probably cost no more than $4,000 – $5,000, with 4 nVidia GTX 295 GPU cards amounting to 1,920 processor cores.

The official announcement can be found here and they even have a guide on how to build your own supercomputer, just don’t burn your office/house down by leaving that hot rod of a machine unattended.

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.

I don’t usually like to regurgitate others blog posts, but Patrick’s post sums up an excellent development that needs to repeated: James Kelly, one of the Manifold forum stalwarts, has created an image server to link to the various map tiles available from OSM. I tested it out quickly and it was working without problems.

The dll for the image server can be found attached to James’ post in Georeference.

I’m addicted to the Manifold user forum Georeference, I visit it every day, have Google Reader notify of new posts. So when it goes down I find it quite disturbing. One could speculate about the cause:

1. ESRI has bought them out and Manifold users will soon be redirected to a Paypal site notifying us we have to spend $20,000 on fees if we want to maintain our license level.
2. Emilio, the resident troll, has caused the forum to implode with an even more inept, inane post about some non-existent bug.
3. A forum update to remove Emilio and all his posts has rendered all posts unreadable.
4. Dimitri’s latest War and Peace response broke the forum.

I’m sure it will turn out to be something quite boring, like a squirrel bringing down the grid.

Update: Looks like No. 3 was the right answer – the new anti-troll measures have wiped all trace of Emilio, even removing his/her/its posts under new usernames. Now if I can set Google Reader to ignore new threads from the PIA I’ll be happy in ignorance of its spewings.