Posted by: "Martyn Stewart"
> I looked at a program called Mapmaker, made in the UK (Maybe it's the same
> as you describe here Walt?)
I doubt it's the same. The MapMaker I have was mac only, dates from
earlier than 1986. Only runs with the original mac os. In fact it came
from when macs did one program at a time. It's unfortunate it's not a
current program as it is a easy to use GIS program that would probably
do what you need. Unless you need dynamically updating maps or such like.
Searching for MapMaker in Google is useless, far too many have used the
name.
There is also another MapMaker, which does run on macs that's a program
that's for elementary school students. Don't know anything about it.
> There is the free "Gratis software" and the pro version, the pro version
> lets you use it unrestricted for 30 days. It would take me that time to get
> to know it a little in-between other work.
Only way to find out what it will do is to try it.
> Maybe I can find GIS maps with various counties, States and import them into
> this program? I'm not afraid to buy a reasonable working program but I don't
> want something to get completely complicated that keeps me at the computer
> for hours on end..
>
> This one at $1500 looks capable too, I have asked for an evaluation CD to
> test it out..
>
> http://www.esri.com/software/arcgis/about/desktop.html
>
>
>
> I have to point out that I have never used GIS software so it's a complete
> learning curve to me..
GIS is a tar baby. Unfortunately there never was any sort of standards
organization, most GIS was built by folks who did command line computing
rather than modern desktop computing. Each person did their own
incompatable thing. As a result there is a bunch of different formats,
and still a long ways to go to something easy to use. Building datafiles
is usually the downfall.
I started out computing on mainframes doing all my own programming.
Mostly large scale air quality, hydrology, and noise models. I got very
good at it. Even with that experience I find the GIS field very annoying.
Some things are slowly standardizing in GIS. In time we may have
standard file formats to work with that all GIS uses. Then maybe the
market will attract some commercial software houses to make easy to use
software.
One big problem for me is the shapefiles are readily available as
downloads. Of files so huge even high speed connections will have their
work cut out for them. I'm on a modem, so can't get those.
> I can't find anything that will work with Filemaker but I don't see that a
> problem as I can export my data into any format I choose.
Filemaker 8 and above can produce data files that are compatable with a
lot of GIS programs. I've not gotten into this yet. In fact just moved
up to 8.5 on my new laptop. My desktop is still at Filemaker 7 so as to
be compatable with Filemaker mobile. They have finally put out Filemaker
mobile 8, so I'll probably update it to 8 soon. Earlier versions could
only import GIS datafiles, but the most recent is supposed to export.
Beyond that Filemaker can be programmed.
You can get turnkey GIS with Filemaker, but it seems to be all from
custom software folks. Try Google with Filemaker GIS as your search.
A GIS using Filemaker to manage the database would be nice. Once
Filemaker can do it all in a simple manner it's going to get much more
usable. I need to spend some time digging in Filemaker to see what I can
do with the new version.
> So in the meantime, if anyone stumbles on a mapping software program that
> gives me states and counties, user friendly I would appreciate it :-)
As I said, MapMaker that I have has all the data and can easily produce
these. The data for the maps is textfiles, I believe. All coordinates
for the shapes. It would be hard to use it's GIS capability due to how
old it is, but I certainly can put together the maps you are asking for.
Walt
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