Tuesday 5 January 2010

Fun with Manifold GIS

This post may not fall strictly within the Enterprise GIS topic but I have just completed my first project with Manifold GIS . This was a little piece of work to create a series of maps for a county sports partnership in the UK; we chose Manifold purely based upon price, and curiosity...

First off - Manifold was upto the job and the client was delighted with the results.  As someone who has used GIS technologies of all shapes and sizes for almost 20 years I have to admit that I was rather stumped by the user interface but, with patience, I was able to find all of the functionality that I needed.

Highlights for me were:
  • A great price, at just USD$400
  • Windows based client application 
  • Is able to read and write a variety of file and database formats
  • Includes a host of analysis functions
  • Supports several Windows scripting/programming languages
Limitations for my purpose were:
  • Was not intuitive for me to use
  • Help documentation not always easy to find and used unfamiliar terms
  • Cartographic facilities were not bad but didn't provide fine grained control
  • Some processing steps went into long loops and failed
  • Exports to PDF but not to GeoPDF yet
I think the Manifold team have done a great job producing this functionality at the price.  Next I want to explore Manifold further to get a better understanding of the customisation facilities and scalability for larger batched processing.

3 comments:

g! said...

My friend, welcome to the Manifold hate/love users.

Chris Marx said...

i think the interface is intuitive, if you assume that what you're looking for is actually easy to find, and follows standard windows app conventions (think word 2003). copy/paste, etc., its a lot easier for new users, but takes arc gis users a little while to realize how much simpler gis can be :)

Anonymous said...

there is a video from a group called gisadvisor on how to actually build an enterprise GIS with Manifold and PostGIS. I haven't seen it, but some people have said it was helpful.