MapInfo Professional v10.0’s redesigned Layer Control system makes users far more productive compared to previous releases of the software. Common operations take fewer clicks and the instant feedback it provides helps new users to learn more quickly. A major benefit of the new system is that the Layer Control operates as a floating, docked or “slide out” window, meaning the user can interact with it and see updates to the map immediately. This makes it more intuitive. For example, a new user in a local authority experimenting with the zoom layering capabilities will see the impact on the map immediately. A town planner or engineer viewing three different map windows of the same area can also work more easily in MapInfo Professional v10.0. For example, the user has one map window containing aerial photography, a second containing the government supplied main mapping source and a third containing the local authority parcel boundaries. Copying a layer from one of the map windows to another is as easy as dragging and dropping. Changing the same layer in all three windows can also be done in one operation instead of three separate efforts. In addition, the new preview button introduced in the Layer Settings dialog boxes allows for multiple previews to be viewed without the need for moving into and out of the Layer Control option. Thus, a site location analyst preparing a report to be presented at a public hearing can easily experiment with different colours and styles in order to create the best looking map possible. MapInfo Professional users tend to have a large number of layers in their map window, and now they can work with these multiple map layers at the same time. In some cases, there may be multiple layers stored as different sets of data, but that should appear on the map as the same style. For example, a crime analyst might have a number of different layers of crime information. The layers might represent sets of data from different time periods or different types of incidents. If a user needs to turn labels off or on for all of the layers at once or change the label font for all of them at once, this can be done in a single operation in MapInfo Professional v10.0. The layers could even be in different map windows. Grouped layer support is a further addition to MapInfo Professional v10.0’s improved Layer Control system. A Grouped Layer is simply a number of individual map layers that are combined and represented as a single virtual layer in the Layer Control system. This allows for a cleaner, easier to read list of layers and allows a whole group to be operated on at once when turning the layer display on and off. The display styles of the individual layers in the group can also still be independently controlled. As an example, this can be useful for a retail site location analyst who might have a number of different levels of geography or tables of different demographic variables available for geodemographic analysis. These can all be organized into one or a number of grouped layers to make the whole list of layers easier to use and manage.

MapInfo Professional v10.0 offers a new toolbar system. The icons have been redesigned to make them easy to distinguish and have a more modern look. The changes are more than just superficial; the tool bars can now be docked anywhere on the screen and the icons are easier to learn as they appear next to their associated menu command.

MapInfo Professional v10.0 offers a new live, automatically updating scale bar facility. This improves map presentation and readability. The new scale bar adapts its values as the view of the map changes.  This is a comprehensive capability offering multiple styles of scale bars and user control over the style and display.

MapInfo Professional v10.0 ships with a high quality Layered PDF driver. Layered PDFs offer flexibility in viewing the resulting map, as the map reader can control the level of detail that is offered. The capability works with both plain map windows and with MapInfo Professional’s Layout window. This new functionality places control of the viewing of complex, multi-layered maps directly into the hands of the user and delivers enhanced levels of viewing customization and flexibility. For map development, this delivers significant time and cost-savings as it eliminates the need for additional maps to be produced when all that is required is a change in layers.

For those unfamiliar with PostgreSQL, it is an open source database system. PostGIS is a spatial add-on developed for PostgreSQL. MapInfo Professional v10.0 directly supports PostGIS databases with no middleware required. Pitney Bowes Business Insight’s support for PostGIS benefits from more than twenty years of experience in working with spatial database systems. MapInfo Professional users that are familiar with how the software works with other spatial databases such as Oracle Spatial or with Pitney Bowes Business Insight’s own SpatialWare technology will be very familiar and comfortable with MapInfo Professional v10.0’s support for PostGIS. The support has been implemented in a manner consistent with how earlier versions of MapInfo Professional already interact with other database systems.

MapInfo Professional v10.0 offers direct connectivity ith the ability to read, write and edit spatial data from an SQL 2008 database system. MapInfo Professional version 9.5 offered read only support to SQL Server 2008 spatial data last year. However, this year the support has been extended to uploading and editing data as well. As with PostGIS, MapInfo Professional v10.0 works directly with the database and no costly middleware is required.

MapInfo Professional v10.0 offers direct access to the latest Excel (.XLSX) and Access (.ACCDB) data formats. This makes the sharing and gathering of geospatial data much simpler and can save organizations significant amounts of time through no longer needing to convert data from one format to another.

MapInfo Professional has long had the ability to allow a user to calculate values across different sets of spatial data. For example, to determine what the percentage is of wetlands area across a set of boundaries such as counties. Version 10.0 offers a tool that simplifies this process by offering a focused user interface.
 
9. UTF-8 support in DBF Files

MapInfo Professional v10.0 offers support for dbf files making use of UTF-8 encoding.

In MapInfo Professional v10.0, all of the configuration and installation information has been consolidated into a single document. The installation of the MapCAD TOOLS (the comprehensive CAD-like editing capabilities introduced last year) has been integrated. Previously, there had been separate manuals for the license server, workgroup installation and others. In addition, EasyLoader v10.0 is  shipping with MapInfo Professional v10.0 this year, avoiding a separate download and install process.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

MapInfo Professional owes much of its ongoing success to the valuable feedback it receives from its worldwide customer base. Pitney Bowes Business Insight’s Product Management and Development teams understand it would be impossible to redesign the product on their own as there are simply too many different types of users, data sources, options, possibilities and use cases.  Therefore, through the company’s annual user conference, beta testing programmes and ongoing contact with the customers that actually  use the product on a day-to-day basis, Pitney Bowes Business Insight is constantly looking to improve MapInfo Professional by gathering, evaluating and implementing this information from existing users. MapInfo Professional v10.0 is the end result of this intensive ongoing process and reflects the evolving needs of users who can now achieve significant time and cost-savings by harnessing the critical relationship between data and geography to make even better, faster and more insightful business decisions.