Manifold Saves the Day

Twice in the last few days, one of our wildlife techs HAD to have some property boundary files loaded onto thier GPS unit. Unfortunately they had been created from a CAD drawing with “true curves”. The file had over 30k vertices. That’s not going to fit into any GPS unit we have.

I didn’t have my computer with ET Geowizards on it available, but I did have my laptop with Manifold. I quickly imported the shapefile into Manifold and used the Simplify tool to get it down to 1ft accuracy. That reduced it down to 385 vertices, which will fit in even the oldest GPS units we have.

So I got to thinking. Why would you want to pay for ET Geowizards for $199 when you can buy Manifold for $245. Manifold gives you a lot of functionality that is not present in the ArcView version of ArcGIS. Quite a bit more than you get with ArcView license and ET Geowizards. I also think it is ridiculous that if you spend $1,500 per single use license not to have the toolset that ET Geowizards gives you. They are merely using available ArcObjects functions to provide you with something that ESRI wants you to pony up $2,500 for.