Tim Rood wrote:
> So, where's the big announcement slated for
> today? I'm going to a MI User's Group meeting at
> 2:00 PST and I'd hoped that the place would be all
> abuzz with the news of....what, a free
> MI-Explorer?
> Tim Rood
It's the Geographic Explorer from Blue Marble. MI declined the
opportunity to do an "MI-Explorer", but this one doesn't do just
MapInfo files. I tried it out yesterday, and it does indeed open and
view MapInfo MID/MIF, Tab, ESRI shape Autodesk DWG, etc. Plus it
translates between these files. It also sits in your Win95 File
Explorer adding a whole new level to "find files"--it can search by
geography! I tried it to see how many data sets I had that
intersected with Boulder county's MBR, and found lots of MapInfo
ones I knew about, some shape files I had forgotten I had, and a DWG
file I didn't even know was there!
There are still a couple of weak spots in it, but there are plans
underway over how we can help perfect it over time. For example, it
doesn't do a perfect job creating MapInfo tab files from shape (some
coordinate truncation happens), but that's slated to get fixed. It
doesn't support images, gif, tif, mig, etc. or cpf files yet, but
there's talk of opening up an interface so that others (us) can link
objects to it that will handle whatever needs handling. But this is
still sort of in the blue sky thinking stage. Knocking down this
data barrier issue is like flattening the Berlin Wall; it could
really changes things. Yeah, I'd say Blue Marble is an "interesting"
company.
It's going to be a free and open tool that anyone can package with
their data and you don't need to "register" it or anything like
that. The catch? None that I can see. It's just the sort of thing an
internet-aware company should be doing anyway, because it's a smart
business strategy in this new environment. It seems like a real
win-win way to develop the industry.
- Bill Thoen
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