Wish Lists

[Mal Bunny]

ER MAPPER USERS:   As an ERM licensee for some 7 years now, I have recently had cause to comment to ER Mapper about a number of “basic functionality” issues .  My comments were prompted by the “publicity” accompanying the recent 6.2 release – I guess I was a little annoyed that whilst all sorts of high-end and application-specific enhancements continue to appear (and rightly so), certain basic functionality appears to have received little if any attention.   We are sporadic users of ERM – we don’t eat, drink and live it on a 7/24 basis – and we use it in a fairly narrow spectrum of the product’s overall capabilities.  Nonetheless we find annotation to be as big a bugbear now as it was 7 years ago.  Many of the basic-functionality matters raised in “wish-lists” which did the rounds of the forum four or five years ago – linked cursors in linked windows, multiple traverse windows, real-time cursor-position reporting (just X,Y in the dataset’s coordinates), the option for a cross-hair versus oblique arrow cursor, etc etc – remain largely unaddressed.   The argument for third-party software and plug-ins for annotation is fine in some circumstances, but does not solve the problems.  In any event, there are some users who cannot justify expensive third party software simply as an annotation tool. Certain annotation, and particularly for interpretation, must be done from within ERM.    Are we the only users who are annoyed that resizing an image window no longer rescales the image, or that we cannot precisely determine where nX, nY is on the image (let alone linked images), or that at the conclusion of plotting there are 3 dialog boxes open requiring 2 mouse clicks to dispense??   ERM is great software, and has been invaluable in our mineral exploration work.  While its scope continues to grow with ongoing high-end enhancements which we all expect, basic functionality and user friendliness must not get lost in the technology.   ERM have advised that they WILL heed user comments and requests, so take the opportunity to resurrect the “basic functionality wish lists”!!!   Mal Bunny Principal Consultant EARTH RESOURCES AUSTRALIA PTY LTD (Mineral Exploration Consultants since 1971)