Re: Wish Lists

[John Berry]

Hi, folks:   I have to second Mal's thoughts.  However, I have to make the proviso that I have sometimes put up with stuff and not complained, so it's partly my fault, and there are also things that have probably been fixed that I don't know about.  When my life slows down a bit I'll try to catch up with things.   I'm still running 6.1 under Windows NT, SP5.   My pet "basic functionality" peeves:       (1) ERMapper vanishes from the face of the Earth about twice a day, usually when I am editing a map.  I haven't identified the particular cause, but it's nothing unusual.       (2)  When I make a map grid with Lat and Long, I get strange symbols (E hat and ??) instead of degrees and minutes, even though my screen has the right symbols.   The strange symbols occur both on hard copy from my HP895 and on JPEGS, etc., made by saving the .alg file as a .jpg file.       (3)  When creating maps, all kinds of weird and unexpected things happen on screen:  they usually are not reflected in the final product, but boy oh boy do they worry you while you're working.  Examples:   when you bring up the box to put something in, you see the image behind it;  when you put something in this box, the last things you put in the map border disappear;  none of the things (North Arrows, Text boxes, Scale bars) correspond in size to the boxes that you put them into, so that you are always having to adjust the size of the box to get the object to sit where you want it.  Especially annoying with the legend boxes, because they only occupy about a quarter of their box, so if you want the text legible you have to extend the enclosing box way off the page.       (3) I support all of Mal's comments in his Paragraph 2.  My biggest problem, though, is that I cannot either SAVE to an ERMappper file, or copy and paste from ERMapper into any other kind of file (especially Excel), a coordinate position (or anything else, such as pixel DN's.).   Nor can I enter a coordinate position and have the cursor go to it:  this is a key thing when entering lease boundaries, etc.(Mal's paragraph 4).   Nor have I found a way of getting a profile of Z (or DN) values across an image (though I haven't looked in a while).  Similarly, I cannot copy and paste from word, etc., to the text areas in, say, the Legend Box in the Map border.       (4) I have said this before recently, but when trying to "save as" in ERMapper, the defaults are crazy, inconsistent, infuriating, and regularly lose me hours of work.  The default SHOULD be to ALWAYS save in the directory that you are currently working in (i.e. the directory that the image you are working on is in).  NOT the last directory you were in, NOR the directory that you were in the last time you shut down ERMapper, nor whatever.       (5)  The Page Setup menu is very confusing (i.e. non-intuitive), and you have to learn by trial and error the sequence in which to do things and the options that get you what you want.   For example, you can really screw up if you use the Snap-shot button at the wrong moment or not at all, but there is no indication on the menu when to use it.  The menu should be laid out the way the work-flow usually goes.   I have yet to figure out what the three options for "Extents from (Page, Borders, Scale) really do:  I just know which one works for me, sort of.   I use "Scale", but the scales it gives me are totally arbitrary, so I have mess with the width of the borders until I get a scale close to the one I want.  If I choose borders, as I recall, the scale is fixed the way I want it, but so are the borders, so I cannot move the map around on the page.   So I can't say, choose a scale of 1:100,000 with a left hand border of 1.25 inches, and let the right hand border fall where it will.  And why on earth is the "Page Extents from Zoom" the default if you can't make a map with this setting enabled, and the pagfe extents are no longer from zoom, as Mal points out?  I never use the Page Set-up Wizard, as the two times that I did try, I couldn't understand what it was asking.       (6)  When I make a .jpeg I am usually offered no chance to vary the size of the output file (as I recall, sometimes I am allowed).    I should always be given this option.       (7)  I haven't tried very hard, but when I have wanted to make a GeoTIFF file, I have usually gotten a notice saying that "The file that is being created is a regular TIFF file".  Is there a way round this??     John Berry Assocs - Remote Sensing Services 5013 Westview Drive, AUSTIN, TX 78731 Ph: +1-512-452-8068  Fx:  +1-512-452-8068 Mo: +1-512-293-8068 e-mail:  [EMAIL PROTECTED] ----- Original Message ----- From: Mal Bunny To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Tuesday, August 07, 2001 8:31 PM Subject: Wish Lists 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)