Manifold Saves the Day
8 12 2006Twice 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.
Matt:
Your experience mirrors ours with Manifold–it’s not central to anything we do on a daily basis but has a lot of processing tools which we find useful periodically and some exotic analysis possibilities.
BT
GRASS can fill this position as well, and it doesn’t cost a thing. Same with PostGIS for vector data. GRASS gives you topology + raster analysis, PostGIS simple vector features + postrges (nuff said).
Cheers,
Dylan
I give it 3 months until you are a total convert! Pretty soon you’ll be quoting Dimitri, and ridiculing dylan for his GRASS and PostGIS comments - LOL!
Resistance is futile!!!
BTW, you said something that usually gets people started with Manifold. In fact, I bought it because of the data types it imports. I figured the $245 was better than buying FME. Then, I discovered all the other stuff it does.
When you’re ready Matt let me know - we’ll be shaving our heads and distributing Manifold flowers in the airport before you know it.
Actually, I am seriously considering it as an ArcView replacement for many of our people that don’t really need all that much in a GIS. That is not to say Manifold isn’t much of a GIS. It’s just that the price is so much less than maintaince & new license costs as we add employees that need some GIS software but will never do much more than make relatively simple maps of where we did stuff for our clients.
I could build something from just about any of the FOSS web based solutions but my time would be better spent elsewhere in our company. We really need a centralized uniformily accessable data store for all our GIS data that we collect. So rather than pay for more licenses and ArcSDE, I think Manifold with a RDBM would be a much better solution for our limited resources. I would be completely sold on the idea if I knew that Manifold could connect to PostGIS or at least a PostgreSQL database.
Matt
that shouldn’t be a problem. Can’t you connect to PostGIS with an ODBC connection? Then, you can store the data as OGC WKB format.