I would echo most of what RH said. I still use Maptitude to convert
data (it reads in more formats that MI -- sucks up DEMs, for example,
and spits 'em back out as MIF with no problem). I found it faster that
Mapinfo for most tasks. I didn't like some features of the interface
(cursors never changed style for different tools, for example) but I
think some have improved with version four, and Maptitude's "better"
data table maintenance (it behaves a little more like a RDBMS than MI
does) for the general user didn't feel flexible enough for my purposes.
I was also turned off by the fact that so many things were "automatic"
but this mainly reflected the fact that I'd grown accustomed to doing
things "by hand" in MI. Maptitude's "features" sometimes make it hard
to tweek a map to perfection for publication. They also didn't have an
academic discount so I could undercut them with Mapinfo for a teaching
lab. List price-wise, though, definitely not $1000 difference.
The US Department of Housing and Urban Development have a contract with
Caliper to supply Maptitude with a whole lot of US housing and
population data to municipalities and community groups around the
country. The canned maps that come with that product give a good sense
of the kinds of applications you can build with Maptitude.
Big factor: ton o' data comes with Maptitude including entire US streets
and zip polygons (default address matching is by address and zip).
I was also impressed by the folks at Caliper who seemed to be quite
smart and responsive, and, unlike MI, I've never gotten the impression
that they were more interested in impression management that product
development.
Richard also mentioned Manifold which as far as I can tell is an awesome
product at an awesome price. It stores data in MS Access format so
offers lots of data integration possibilities and has network analysis
built right in. It's a way more powerful tool than AV, MI, Mapt, or
others but it's also far less than straightforward for those of who
think in GIS terms. On Richard's "which day do they get it" scale it
might be more like the second weekend. Still, they give it to you for
$100 for a site license so it's worth checking out. Full TIGER97 for
another hundred or so.
Dan Ryan
Mills College
Oakland, CA
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