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Many different products for widely differing purposes are all called "mapping" products. Be careful not to buy a "canned" product if you need flexibility. Are you experienced? See the GIS User's Overview. Here are some common requests and products to service them:
Manifold System	I want to create maps for a web site Manifold IMS (Internet Map Server) is built right into Manifold System to allow you to serve cool maps to the web, without any programming!. It's cooler and more efficient than old-fashioned map servers that cost thousands of dollars!
Web sites or "Canned" Road Atlases	I need driving instructions to .... Do an Internet search for a website that offers driving instructions, or buy a simple computer road atlas like DeLorme or Microsoft AutoMap. Web sites give instant gratification, but don't take them too literally.
Manifold System	I want to download a map I can use and change You can't change maps you get from web servers or those in "canned" map atlas programs. If you need to change a map or add data get a real mapping program like Manifold System. Make sure your mapping program can read government map formats, so you can download free maps from government sites.
Simple Viewer or Manifold System	I need a program to show my data in simple, fixed maps Depending on what your data is, this could be very easy or it could be more complex. Quite likely the choice will be either MapPoint or Manifold System or both. MapPoint has an unchangable set of maps but lets you display data in simple ways. Manifold lets you display data as well as using any map or modifying or creating maps. Manifold can handle satellite and aerial photos as well as working in shaded relief and 3D.
Manifold System	I want to display/analyze demographic data If you need to do any sort of analysis there is no finer program or stronger system than Manifold System. Manifold has extraordinary data discovery tools, like the Decision Support System and neurofuzzy "More Like this" technology not found in old-fashioned products.
Manifold System	Is a real GIS mapping program too hard to use? Not with Manifold. It's often easier to use a professional quality tool than consumer stuff, because the professional tool has fewer limits. Plus, you never outgrow high quality software. Time invested in learning the program will never be obsolete.
Manifold 5.00	I want to work with a GPS receiver to show a moving map and mark points? Manifold is the only professional GIS program that includes a GPS console. Run Manifold on your laptop and the GPS will automatically move the map. Mark points, add data, and even draw complete lines as you move. This is a great way to map trails, ranches or other properties.
Geocoder	I want to show a database of addresses on a map This is a two step project: first you "geocode" the address database to add latitude/longitude to each record, and then you display it in a map program of your choice. Manifold provides a Geocoding Tools extension to make street address geocoding fun and easy.
Manifold System	I need to create maps from aerial photos Straightforward with Manifold. It's often easier to use a professional quality tool than consumer stuff, because the professional tool has fewer limits. Plus, you never outgrow high quality software. Time invested in learning the program will never be obsolete.
	Don't settle for a viewer when you need a real mapping program. Don't settle for a costly consumer program when you can get a professional tool for the same price. Don't waste your money on an old-fashioned GIS that costs ten times as much as Manifold and does much less!
Mapping Programs vs. Map Data All mapping products have essentially two elements: the digital map database itself and the mapping software that reads the map database and creates an image on the screen. Products that are limited to displaying a single database of maps will often blur the distinction and will simply say they are selling an "electronic map" or an "electronic atlas". However, whatever the product calls itself it will include a map database of some kind and a program to display and manipulate that database at the behest of the user. Map Databases Some consumer programs are designed to use only a single map database that is built into the program. Such programs are often sold as "mapping" programs, but they are more accurately described as map viewing programs. They provide simplicity and ease of use by limiting all options. Other programs can use a variety of different map databases to display different maps. The most capable mapping programs can use mapping data from a wide variety of different formats, edit map data to make corrections or other changes or create new maps and map data using a variety of methods. Map databases include at a minimum the location of points and lines and other simple geometric shapes that are used to draw the map. A more sophisticated map data set will include database information associated with objects in the map. For example, a simple map data set of streets might include only the geometric data necessary to draw street lines. A more sophisticated street map data set might include in addition a set of data fields such as the name of each street and what type of street it is. How much more information is included depends on the intended purpose of the map and how it will be used. The specific capabilities of the mapping software that will utilize the map data set will also play a role. Another main division in types of mapping databases are between vector and raster databases. A "raster" map is not a database: it is an image in TIFF or other image format. a vector database is a true map database. To understand the difference, consider the difference in a picture of a house as shown in an image editing program such as PhotoShop and as the blueprint of a house might be shown in a CAD program such as AutoCAD. The CAD program allows us to "grab" the lines that make up a doorframe or a window and move them about, to calculate their width and height and so on. Try to "grab" a doorframe or a window in an image and you'll see that (as Gertrude Stein once remarked about Oakland...) "there's no 'there' there." There's no "doorframe" or "window" object in a picture of a house. All that we have in any raster image are some pixels that are differently colored in a sea of other pixels. Our eyes can see them as a door or a window, but as far as the program is concerned there are simply slight differences in color. In another example, word processing documents are vector documents. Individual letters and words can be searched for, replaced, reformatted and otherwise edited. If you've ever tried to "edit" the raster image of words that are sometimes found as images on websites, you know the difference right away. Raster maps are like those raster images of documents occasionally found on web sites: if you don't mind that your only use of the map will be to see it as the TIFF image provided to you there is no problem. If you want to change it, rescale it, reformat it or otherwise use it like a real map to measure things, calculate areas and so on, then stick to vector format maps. In fact, one of the biggest uses of raster maps on web sites is to *prevent* users from grabbing valuable map data and then re-using it in their own way. This is not to say that the use of raster images in mapping is wrong: it's certainly cool to use aerial photographs and other images related to maps in presentations, slide-shows and even embedded within maps. However, this use of raster images is a different thing than map creation and editing, just as the manipulation of raster images within photo-editing programs is different than changing blueprints or 3D models in a CAD program, or changing documents in a word processor or web site editor. Keep the difference in mind, especially because some low-end "mapping" programs are merely slide-show viewers that display a selection from a set of TIFF or JPEG images. Cheap image display development software is now so widely distributed that it costs almost nothing to create a program that will find a TIFF image on a CD and display it. Because the US Government has made available lots of scanned.png, TIFF or JPEG images of maps online, some entrepreneurs have created map display programs that consist of a selection of map images on CD together with a viewer. A real GIS that can truly work with raster images will include professional quality image-editing capabilities like those in Adobe PhotoShop. That's what Manifold 5.00 includes - superior integration of raster images along with vector drawings, terrain elevation surfaces and other GIS data within a single, integrated package that anyone can afford. Mapping Software Like all software, the mapping software programs used to display digital map databases must strike a balance between simplicity and capability as well as between cost and capability required in the target market. The big divide in mapping software is between programs that are limited to viewing a fixed set of maps and programs that let you change the maps. Programs that work with a fixed set of maps are normally called viewers, while programs that allow you to change the maps are often called map editors or GIS's (for "Geographic Information Systems"). Viewers come in two flavors: some viewers are limited to only a single data set of maps, while other viewers can display any pre-built map database as long as it is in the format supported by the maker of the viewer. The former are often called by some consumer brand name, such as Microsoft AutoMap, while the latter are often sold by GIS vendors and are referred to as "viewers." Because there is the same level of unwarranted marketing hype in the mapping software industry as there is in the rest of the computer industry, one often finds simple viewers sold as "GIS" or "Mapping" programs. For example, Microsoft's MapPoint 2002 is a really nice viewer. MapPoint provides a collection of well-selected maps that are built into the program that may be used as a setting for the display of business data. However, MapPoint cannot create new business data nor does it allow alteration of the base maps built into it. In that respect, it is very much a "viewer only" product and very much not a "mapping program" or GIS as such are generally understood. Mapping programs that use unchangeable, built-in maps will often focus on providing well-formatted, pretty versions of those maps. Since the program uses a fixed set of maps, a cartographic stylist can assign a roster of allowed choices for the display options that will result in a nice map. Because there are no user options possible, it's much harder for inept users to create an ugly map of a specific region. However, it's also not possible for users to add features to a map, such as an outline of wetlands, to create custom maps or to improve upon the built-in map by merging in other maps or additional information fetched from the Internet. The ability to make small (or large) alterations is often highly-desired by users; however, it does require making the program more complex because additional options must be included. It is also true that using a real mapping program instead of a fixed-format viewer will require some "tinker time" to create pretty maps. Just like using a word processor to create a new document requires some thought and formatting to produce an elegant, appealing document, using a full-featured mapping program will also require some thought as well as good taste to produce an appealing map. Our experience with Manifold is that any reasonably intelligent Windows user who is willing to read the examples in the user manual will be able to create attractive and appealing maps from almost any source. In fact, many Manifold users report they enjoy the control and flexibility of applying different effects and customizing that's possible. If a program offers pre-set scene color schemes and otherwise has easy-to-use formatting commands (like Manifold) it is possible to start with reasonably formatted examples and then create one's own appealing maps. Manifold also allows inclusion of absolutely striking data, like shaded relief surfaces, to provide eye-grabbing distinction to the maps you create. Mapping programs that use a fixed map database can be made very easy to use. They can even be very satisfying for many purposes if the built-in map is carefully drawn. However, such programs are so limiting that except for the most elementary uses they eventually become frustrating to use. In the past, people would settle for a "viewer only" product because true mapping programs cost many thousands of dollars. In recent years, PC hardware and software technology have advanced so rapidly that full-featured mapping programs cost no more than simple viewers. Price is not everything, of course, but prices in the range of $245 for full featured packages such as Manifold 5.00 are a very different situation for most users than prices in the range of $1450 or $14,500 as is the case with traditional GIS packages. Proprietary Viewers Be wary of map viewing programs that can load and display different map databases but which require any new maps to be in the vendor's proprietary format. Such programs are often given away free to get users "hooked" so the vendor can then sell them more maps at inflated prices compared to the rest of the market. Mapping software companies are not stupid: they know that by giving away viewers they can often make big money by selling maps to plug into those viewers, or by selling very expensive authoring packages that are used to create new maps. The situation is directly analogous to the Adobe Acrobat viewer for documents. Adobe gives away Acrobat in order to sell Adobe .pdf format authoring packages. Nobody in their right mind would source the Adobe authoring packages for general purpose word processing: we all use Microsoft Office for that, right? However, to the extent Adobe can proliferate Acrobat they preserve a market for their authoring tools that would otherwise disappear overnight. It is important to avoid getting stuck with a map display program that can use only one map or that requires purchasing maps in a proprietary format from one supplier. If you get stuck with a program that forces you to buy data from a single vendor, you'll discover how expensive digital maps can be. A corollary to this proposition is that if you buy a program that forces you to *author* data in a single vendor's mapping software, you will discover how stratospherically expensive proprietary mapping software can be. Perhaps the best known company providing free viewers for proprietary formats is the ESRI company with their "Arc" stuff product line. Arc Explorer is their free viewer for maps created with ArcView and Arc/INFO. ESRI's mapping programs cost thousands of dollars. They are so expensive and so insulated from competition that ESRI does not even publish prices on their web site. If you get stuck buying their products, ESRI will tell you what you need to pay. Having captive customers sure is good business if you can get it! We think ESRI gets this attitude because of their long history of government sales. Once you get used to selling the GIS equivalent of $500 hammers and $2000 toilet seats in a non-competitive market is sure must be difficult to get used to selling products for real prices that price-savvy civil buyers are willing to pay! The best way to avoid this trap is to buy a mapping program that can read *any* popular map data format, especially those in formats used by the US Government to provide free maps. If your mapping program (like ours, Manifold System) can use maps from virtually any format you know you will always be able to get free maps or get competitive pricing on the map databases you choose to purchase. Map Data comes from the Government Virtually all map data originates with governments. Just about all of the wonderful maps popping up on web sites or embedded within consumer applications utilize digital map data that governments created at the cost of billions of dollars. Governments need to create detailed digital maps to fulfill their civil and military responsibilities and only governments can afford the remote sensing tools, such as satellites, as well as the capital and labor costs involved in creating detailed digital maps. In the United States, like all other non-classified government technical material, all of this wonderful map data is free for the taking. By law, it is in the public domain and can be taken and resold. In fact, quite a few companies are in the business of taking free government maps, changing them a bit using tools like Manifold System, and then reselling those maps to the masses in the form of proprietary map products. In contrast, virtually all other countries sell their government map data and attempt to enforce a government monopoly on the sale of map data. Except for international map data created by the US, it is very difficult to find free maps of international areas. To this day, the very best digital maps of the entire world are those created by US military organizations and released by the US government. From the above it sounds like we have a wealth of data in the US that other nations do not have. This is true, but there's a catch: most of the data published by US agencies is published in a form that is unusable by ordinary citizens. All of those billions of dollars in digital map creation often end up increasing the personal fortunes of a few, limited GIS companies because the government publishes the data in unique formats that only a handful of privileged inside contractors can utilize. For example, DLG, SDTS, VPF and TIGER formats are used by USGS, the military, and the Census Bureau for highly detailed maps; however, until Manifold appeared on the mapping scene the only practical way to utilize these free maps was to purchase an expensive, old-fashioned GIS system plus one or more expensive format converter packages. USGS publishes hundreds of gigabytes of detailed, high-quality free maps for the US. Almost all of them are in DLG, DEM, or SDTS formats. If you have Manifold you can download and utilize these maps. If you have another GIS package, you will likely have to purchase a converter that in many cases will cost more than all of Manifold System! Manifold does such a good job of converting many formats and it is so inexpensive that many ESRI, MapInfo and other users have purchased Manifold just to make it possible to convert many different formats into their "home" GIS system. Remember: no matter how fancy the marketing of a specific digital map product, it is quite likely that most of the map originated in free public domain digital maps published by the US Government. Although some companies do in fact provide significant additions or changes to government maps, most commercial maps that are based on government maps have few or relatively unimportant changes. Despite the numerous marketing claims often made for privatized versions of government maps, most of the government data resold in proprietary formats has not been changed except to be converted from the government's open format to a proprietary map format. Mapping Software in the Market Here is a quick survey of "mapping" applications or data sets you'll find in the market together with some advantages and disadvantages of each: Web Site Maps These are created by software and web sites, like Maptech, that lives in the web server and gives you pictures on demand. Sophisticated web map servers will include controls that allow panning and zooming when creating the map image. However, at the end of the day what you get is a bitmapped image just like all the other images on the web. You can't "grab" the map data from such web sites and later create your own maps or make changes to the maps that are presented. In fact, some organizations are now moving maps that used to be provided in free digital form onto web servers to *prevent* users from grabbing the map data. Except for Manifold IMS, software for browsing map databases and serving them to the web is at present very expensive, specialty software requiring immense technical expertise to set up. Manifold IMS, which is built into Manifold 5.00, gives anybody the ability to publish interactive maps to the web without any programming. These can be drawings, images, surface, CAD diagrams or anything else in a Manifold project. Soccer leagues can publish maps of fields, park rangers can publish maps of trails, fishing clubs can publish maps of catches, factories can publish interactive maps on their intranets of their assets and plant layouts taken from AutoCAD files... anything! Your one-time cost of Manifold is all you pay. Cool! Consumer Automobile Map Programs Consumer mapping programs usually achieve ease-of-use by limiting the program to displaying only a single map database that is bundled with the program. Such programs keep life simple for the user by eliminating almost all options. There is only one map, and you get to look at it using the specific formatting style chosen by the map software. Automobile map programs such as Microsoft AutoMap and the DeLorme series of products are good examples. These often include a database with the map that's bundled into the program and often include simple search (find nearby hotels) or routing (find the shortest path from A to B) capabilities. Most of the effort in creating an automobile planner goes into keeping the built-in street database as accurate as possible. Every map view created with such a package is therefore usually a pretty good image with good labels and other cartographic characteristics. The good news is that they are great as a computerized automobile road atlas. The bad news is that is all they do. If you want to show your sales data figures as colored regions in a map, or show a new map such as a US government map of streets in Sarajevo, you need a more capable program. "Canned" Consumer Mapping Applications Some companies now offer consumer mapping applications that provide US government data in a "canned" form for a specific purpose. For example, one company provides a set of US state and county maps in a fixed form together with a set of demographic statistics on crime, education and other parameters. Real estate agents and other users can display simple maps of various areas with counties colored in by a specific demographic attribute such as crime rate. If the specific set of data is exactly what you want and you'll never need to see any other data or change the map in any other way, such applications are fine. However, such applications cannot make any changes at all, however slight. If you would like to show a new map from the Internet or your own data, or ask a question that is not in the limited set built into the program, this is not possible. Microsoft MapPoint Microsoft's new MapPoint provides a fixed set of basic maps for the United States together with a schematic map for the rest of the world. MapPoint is designed to show database information that matches the fixed set of maps it can show (by coloring the different map objects in accordance with the data set). MapPoint can also show database information that can be shown as data points on the map. Any GIS can do this. The MapPoint approach is to pick these two functions out of the several hundred that most GIS's can accomplish and make them very easy to use. If your data is matched exactly to the maps MapPoint includes, this is a good approach. If you never have to change the map in any particular, MapPoint is a good choice to display simple data sets that match the built-in maps. However, if you wish to do even the most elementary additions, such as dividing a state into four sales regions, or drawing an outline of a wetlands region, you're out of luck. Another problem is that other than changing the display of data points MapPoint has no analytic capabilities at all, not even simple statistics, nor can any be added. If you wish to know the water area of a lake, or the acreage devoted to a certain land use, the program cannot tell you. In MapPoint, the items in the map are basically "dead" images and cannot be treated as "live" objects whose characteristics can be used in computations. In contrast, in a more powerful application such as Manifold the items shown in the map are real, living objects that can be used in calculations. For example, in Manifold one can click on a state and find out its area, or length of its boundary, or the percentage of it's area that's overlapped by a lake. In a more powerful mapping program, the visual images of items shown are not just scenery, they are "handles" that one can use to grab data and learn new things. Proprietary Map Viewing Programs Perhaps the best known of these is ArcExplorer, a product of the ESRI company that is distributed free of charge and which is able to display for viewing (but not editing) purposes maps that are in ESRI formats. Proprietary map viewing programs are to maps what Adobe Acrobat is to Adobe format documents: they are a means of displaying maps that are created in a specific vendor's proprietary formats. Adobe gives Acrobat away in order to sell its document authoring tools. Like all vendors of proprietary viewers, companies that give away viewers will dress up their marketing with all sorts of claimed benefits to the user: they often cite the ability to "share maps across platforms" and so on. However, as experienced users know well the real benefit is to the company in two areas: it requires sale of the companies (usually very expensive) authoring tools and it promotes a proprietary format that protects the company from competition. Note that none of the proprietary map viewer (including ArcExplorer) can be used to create new maps. For that, a real mapping program such as Manifold or ArcView or MapInfo is required. True Mapping Programs High end mapping programs are usually called Geographic Information Systems (or "GIS" programs for short). A GIS can display any map database in the formats it supports. Good GIS programs will include the ability to create new maps, to modify existing maps and to use many different map database formats. Surprisingly, as the computer market evolves the cost of a mapping program is not a very accurate guide to the capability or ease of use of a program. Technology is changing so rapidly that shape of the playing field and the rules of play are changing faster than slower players can react. As a result, inexpensive and highly capable programs exist in the same market together with frightfully old-style, expensive and user-unfriendly software. Old-style GIS Programs Most of the established GIS packages on the market are really ancient things that were developed long before Windows. A further disadvantage of such programs is that the companies selling them utilize an ancient style of marketing that reminds us of the proprietary marketing style used by many of the extinct minicomputer vendors. Like many things in computing, computer mapping started out over 30 years ago in the land of government and military spending. [The experienced reader already knows we are talking about some *really old stuff* here!] Except for a few academic establishments, government and military users were the only ones who could afford both the hardware and software for digital mapping as well as the labor costs of digitizing maps. The mapping companies that dominate the high end of today's market have evolved to service government and military organizations. Not surprisingly, they continue sell their wares in what many PC people will judge to be a really "closed" style of marketing compared to most PC software companies. ESRI Perhaps the best known of the established GIS companies is ESRI, which for many years sold a high end product called Arc/INFO and a slightly more modern, if less capable, program called ArcView. By PC standards, both are stratospherically expensive with individual licenses selling for thousands or tens of thousands of dollars when all options are added. By our standards, neither of these programs uses Windows standards well, if they can be said to use Windows standards at all. In fact, contemplation of the ancient style of user interface (reminiscent of something from FORTRAN programs of the 1980's) employed in Arc/INFO is what cause the merry marketing crew at Manifold to coin the phrase "living fossil" as applied to GIS. This stuff is so archaic it makes a Coelacanth look swift and modern. In all fairness, given enough training it is possible to achieve almost anything in GIS using Arc/INFO. It is the standard used by numerous government agencies to prepare the maps they use. However, that doesn't mean you should use it for your mapping anymore than you would be foolish enough to dive into using the military's ADA language to program instead of Visual Basic or Microsoft Visual C++. In the last year or so ESRI has tried to introduce a new version of its products that are programmed for Windows, called the ArcGIS 8 family of products. These include several modules that continue the ESRI tradition of stratospherically expensive and complicated products. Unfortunately, ESRI seems to have taken the ancient architecture of ArcINFO and ArcView and reimplemented that same old architecture within a Windows programming framework. For example, with ESRI, you still have to keep points, lines and areas in different drawings. Imagine... spending thousands of dollars for software and you can't draw a point and a line together in the same drawing. We think that's totally idiotic. Many users of ESRI products say Manifold's products are faster, smarter and overall much better products even though Manifold's GIS products cost one tenth as much. For example, even though it costs about ten times as much, ArcGIS 8 doesn't have a fraction of Manifold's capabilities to work with images, surfaces and 3D terrain view. Despite spending $20,000 on a huge ESRI bundle of old-fashioned products you still don't get an Internet Map Server like Manifold provides at no charge as part of Manifold's $245 price. See the GIS Introduction pages for comparisons. MapInfo Taking second place in the GIS market is probably MapInfo corporation. A Very Long Time Ago (eight or ten years? ... who knows it was so long ago...) these guys were the new kids on the block and featured an aggressively-priced (that is, under $3000) alternative to ESRI products. MapInfo is still a nice program and indisputably easier to learn than ESRI's Arc/INFO. However, in our view it is still very expensive, it still charges extra for what we feel should be essential parts of the package (such as scripting languages and converters), and does not offer as much capability as Manifold System does for a tenth of the price. We don't sell our product on price, but when we do much more for a factor of ten less in price, we feel that is so great a disparity it is worth noting. In almost every area, Manifold is much stronger and provides more capability than MapInfo. For example, MapInfo also has dreadfully primitive image capability compared to Manifold and does not include integrated support for surfaces. It lacks an Internet Map Server and does not have remotely near the analytic capability of Manifold. Scripting capability is not built in but must be purchased extra. MapInfo also suffers from a serious lack of respect for Windows standards in our eyes. For example, they expect users to purchase a copy of "Map Basic," their own proprietary Basic language, if they wish to expand MapInfo capabilities. We think it's foolish to program in some mapping company's proprietary Basic language when the rest of the world uses Visual Basic or other Microsoft languages. See the GIS Introduction pages for more detailed comparisons between Manifold and MapInfo. Other, Older GIS packages In addition to ESRI and MapInfo products, there are a wide variety of stratospherically-priced specialty programs from various mapping vendors. If you need one of these, the salesman is already knocking on your door since the target market for most of these is so small that all likely candidates have been identified. There are a few "second generation" old-style programs that provide much better software than pre-Cambrian stuff like Arc/INFO, but none of these programs we believe is as modern or as capable as Manifold, and none of them is remotely close to the price of Manifold, either. The New Kids on the Block: Manifold In the last five years we have seen a revolution in computer technology that may dwarf all that has come before. There has simultaneously been a revolution in the cost of PC hardware, in the capabilities of PC *development* software and a revolution in the marketing of software made possible by the arrival of Internet. These three simultaneous revolutions have made Manifold possible. Since everyone knows about PC hardware being transformed (we just purchased a 100 GB hard disk for $140, and we get RAM for about $70 a gigabyte....) and Internet, but unless you are a software developer you may be unaware of just how radically the change in development tools has transformed development on PCs. As much as Internet has been "happening" in the last five years, in the development community a bigger event has been the arrival of Microsoft development environments as superior instruments for crafting new programs. Until recently, all the cool tools were in UNIX. Now, the best tools are Microsoft Visual Studio and the supporting ensemble of Microsoft resources. All of the other full-featured GIS programs in the market today were created using primitive development tools or cross-ported from UNIX to be made to run in Windows. Only Manifold was created from the ground up in the last two years using the latest and best Microsoft tools. As a result, for the first time a modern GIS program that combines the ease of use and Windows standards of simple viewing programs can contain power and capability superior to older programs, all while costing the same as ordinary PC programs: by that we mean $245 and not $1500 or $2450 or $24,500. The low price and aggressive marketing of Manifold via Internet sometimes will fool people into thinking it is a small, or limited program. Don't be fooled: Manifold is an integrated application that is as capable in the GIS arena as Oracle is in databases or PhotoShop is in image editing. In fact, Manifold includes database capability similar in many key ways to Oracle and image processing like that of PhotoShop. Although the power and numerous options within Manifold are well-arranged within a system of menus, any serious crawl through the Manifold 5.00 User Manual will show that Manifold may well be the most sophisticated and powerful program you have installed on your computer. Manifold is designed exclusively for Microsoft Windows environments. As a result, we don't have to make an endless series of compromises so that the system can also be sold on Mac, in UNIX, or in other environments. We respect all those other environments but attempting to support them would require serious limitations in the Windows version of the product. We would rather create a product for that 94% of the market that is using Windows and to make that Windows version of Manifold all that it can be. In all cases, Manifold leverages Microsoft capability. The result is a program of formidable capability at what seems to be an impossibly low price. By freeing our team from re-inventing the wheel when creating dialogs that are already standard in Windows, we are able to invest every minute of development time into more powerful capabilities that are easier to use. For example, the old-fashioned GIS packages like ArcView and MapInfo use a color-selection dialog that is different than the Windows standard. Each of those dialogs required time spent by a talented programmer to come up with something that would work in a variety of different operating systems. Manifold uses the standard Windows color selection dialog. The time we saved reinventing that wheel was put to good use doing things like ViewBots or the Decision Support System or Manifold's "More Like This" technology. Not only does using standard Windows dialogs save development time, it also assures that any changes in your Windows system (such as a new graphics card or increase/decrease in your color settings) will automatically work correctly with Manifold. It also makes it a lot easier for a newcomer to learn the system, because so many dialogs are the familiar Windows standards. See the Manifold Benefits page for specific capabilities of interest to newcomers to mapping and GIS. Simply put, there is virtually nothing that can be done in GIS at almost any price that likely cannot be done better and faster with Manifold. Anything Else like Manifold? Are there any other programs like Manifold in the GIS market, that have been developed using modern techniques and are sold at PC prices instead of minicomputer prices? We don't know of any, nor do we think it is likely that any additional ones will evolve in the near future. In the competitive ecology of GIS marketing, the market niches aren't all that large. Once a player gets established in a given niche, rarely is there room for another entrant to break into that niche. Manifold was the first to exploit modern development technology. We also introduced a number of other developmental innovations to enhance by a factor of ten or so the number of algorithms and processing capability of our system. Manifold is now already in its fifth major release in four years and by now is evolving so rapidly that it is very difficult for any third party to catch up. Even if someone could catch up to the rate at which Manifold is evolving, we believe it would be very difficult for someone to deal with our cut-throat, price-cutting approach to marketing. Our heroes in this are the Dells and the Gateways of the PC world, who thrived in part by increasing performance and cutting price before their competitors forced them too. The strategy we aim for is not merely to be the most affordable: we also want to be the best by any measure. Being both the best and the least expensive is a great way to occupy a marketing niche! See for Yourself Manifold comes with a 30 day, money-back guarantee. If you need more than a viewer and want to get going with real mapping, get a copy of Manifold. If you are not completely, absolutely happy with the product, return it for a full refund. Your only risk is the cost of shipping to and from. If you are an academic institution, visit our licensing pages. Manifold has the best academic license in the business: for the cost of a single copy (... that's right, a single copy at $245) your school can get a license for unlimited copies for unlimited non-commercial use. Think modern. Think Manifold!
Home Page - Products - Search - Support - Shopping - News - Online Store Personal Mapping - GIS - Database Commander - 3D View Studio - Maps and Data Testimonials - Y2K - Links - Licensing - Privacy Statement - Terms Of Use Š 2006 CDA International Ltd. All Rights Reserved. Manifold is a Registered Trademark of CDA Prices, terms and conditions, and product specifications subject to change without notice. Please contact Manifold Net with any special needs or requests. Order any product online through the Manifold Online Store using secure forms. The Store is open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Many products may be downloaded immediately after purchase for instant gratification.