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 -----
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)
