my 2p from the point of view of a part time developer... I did some 'exploratory' work with mapx mobile last year, and a little bit of work with arcpad to compare...the remit was to develp a tool to capture points, lines and polygons with structured, menu-driven attibutes, store them in a database on a WinCE pda and get it back to a pc with out losing anything...
map x mobile good points: The mxMob development kit (and the microsoft evb/evb development kit.) are/were FREE! fab! (but the total mx+evb download is c.400 megs so dont try this in the uk on a 56k phone line!!!) Installation was pretty straightforward once i had RTFM (twice!) you need Nt or win2000 i failed to get anything working in 95 or 98 I know only a little vb but the MXMob and eVB software-help-examples etc were all very easy to use and understand. Development for simple applications was very fast (i had 5 days to it all from scratch including the report on how i got on..i went over-budget by 3 hours and admittedly the test app was buggy, but its potential to be fixed with not much extra cash was obvious....main failure was developer inability not software limitation) MXMob appears to do a heck of a lot.. I would call it a solid GIS somewhere between proviewer and an early mapinfoprofesional ( but much nearer the professional end of that scale!!....depending upon your programming skills,,,if you cant program you wont get far), it also has the excellent MapX feats like multilayer selections. I very quickly tested the ability of the software to capture, edit graphic and attribute data in native and ADO formats...no probs here, but writing code to manage searches/ data edits etc was a little fiddly I would say that an accomplished programmer would go a long way with the SDK Downsides.... it is only an sdk (with some examples.). ie its just an active x component. To get anything up-and running you have to program the lot (but you can programme almost everything.....unlike arcpad which comes as a readybuilt gis that runs vbscripts... so you will initially have to re-write the examples or scratch build everything...that includes all menus, tools etc etc..on teh good side it means the GUI is completely up to you and so modularisation of 'functions' for different users is easy I found the application became quite slow on the older iPaqs i was using (but it was doing a lot of work thru my not-v-efficient code), not a problem with the newer strongarm 400 ones. the slow speed was probably due to accessing ado files to build 'info' windows of data. to get 'everything' to work robustly you will probably need to use eVC at some point. the MxMobile-demo executable supplied with the SDK was built with visual studio. i tried and tried to get evb, mxmob and a gps to work together but my limited programming skills stopped me dead (if anyone has a set of free functs for grabbing live GPS in MXMob with eVB let me know!) The example of using GPS in the SDK was ok but only worked with waypoint files not live data... Overall mxmob has great potential for real-programmers who want to move into developing mobile mapping without big initial outlay.. fully licenced the applications would be very cheap compared with some of the off-the-shelf stuff currently available..(check out the website for current costs) the real bargain was discovering the evb/evc software and all the ocx plugins now available...its perfectly possible to build a mapping application that activesyncs itself, links to gps (maybe), laser rangefinders etc, processes mapdata into 3d to view in a PDA 3d viewer, emails the data automatically to another user, finds the nearest pub and switches off the tv as you set off for work... in the end, our conclusion was that the mapping side of things actually became secondary to the databasing opportunities and so Mapinfo has pitched it just right for people who need mobile-mapping functionality 'AS WELL' rather than 'ONLY'.. I only very briefly tested arcpad (we had other developers to set these systems up for us) Arcpad is not free, but not too expensive either, the development kit (a scripting tool) is also 'not free' and feedback from my fellow testers was that it seemed a lot of money (esp when they compared it with the free evb/c kits from microsoft....) There is software for turning mapinfo table formats into suitable scripts... this kind of thing is v useful and i suspect will become more widely copied/developed It works as a straight-out-of-the-box gis and is very arcview like. basic functionality includes data capture and searches etc, (again id say it was between arcexplorer and arcview), to add data capture (forms) functionality you write scripts and they run on top of the application. It appeared to be function rich (it did GPS no-probs) but the developers didnt actually get to do much 'serious' development (just making data entry forms) so i am not sure how far it can be customised One drawback i noted was a lack (i might be wrong) of ADO support... so with MapxMob i could happily populate a mapinfo flat file AND an entire pocket access database with multiple tables and dictionaries etc at one go, whilst the arcpad team ended up with just a flatfile (DBF format) and lots of post-processing databasing... I'd say that if you need GIS immediately and are capturing limited attribute data then arcpad would be the fastest and overall cheapest to roll out... I also looked at the bumpf for other SDK for mobilemapping (there are several...they all seemed pretty good.. but costs varied) hth R ps i forgot to mention...as the CDR group say in their email.. 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