Another Recent Newsgroup Thread about Manifold System

Here is yet another series of postings about Manifold System Release 4.50 GIS that occurred in comp.infosystems.gis when a writer asked the GIS community if they had real experience with Manifold.... (Alternate colors are different postings in the thread... names have been removed to protect posters' privacy.)

I'm looking for one which is at least halfway serious. Does anyone have hands-on experience with Manifold, TNTLite or some equivalent package??

Facts please, not just Great or Gross

I have been using Manifold for two and a half year, and had no experience
with GIS whatsoever before that. Since I am a computer professional since
more than 20 years I knew what I would like to do and how it could be done,
and all that and more does the Manifold. What I like is not just the
configurability and extensibility of the product is that to this day I have
had no problems importing any files, there are so many possibilities.

My use for Manifold has been as a hobby tool to assist people making maps of
lakes (depth charts) (for instance for use as tools to fishing club's put
and take waters). So the semi professional use is definately there, and the
price is nice. A nice price sometimes has drawbacks like slow and bad
support, but not here. 3 times I have used the support mainly for things I
didn't understand because GIS is not my profession, and I always got VERY
GOOD assistance. Also, since I use input to Manifold from a Garmin 12XL as
well as a Garmin 165S, I made some suggestions to have the GPS interface
also being able to read and convert $DPT and $DBT NMEA sentences, and I
explained the use for it, I got a nice email back stating they are
considering this for the 5.0 release. Well, I will have to see about that
being implemented, I got a nice reply, which is more than you get from many
program vendors.

One other thing about Manifold is the programming language, it is
Microsoft's Visual Basic for Applications, which is quite similar, but
simpler than the ordinary VB Enterprise Edition I use in my daily work,
there is so much source code about and so much knowledge about VB and VBA
(they are probably the most used programming languages worldwide) that it is
easy to get assistance from friends and collegues et c.

minor correction - Manifold's user programmability/scripting is
Currently implemented using Microsoft Scripting - VBS or JavaScript -
which is more limited than VBA but adequate to the task.

I've heard that V5 may support better programmability.

Yes you´re correct, it is Visual Basic Scripting Edition, VBScript,
same as used in Internet Explorer and quite capable...

I am just getting started in GIS and am coming from a Windows
programmer analyst/DBA background. I really like Manifold's use of the
Windows paradigm and DB/ODBC tools. I got the standard evaluation
copies of ArcView and a few others and Manifold was head and shoulders
above them. I can't even begin to figure out how I would integrate my
existing business data with ArcView and the others, but there seem to
be several alternatives with Manifold.

I used Manifold's TIGER/Line import capabilities to adopt the TIGER 98
files as our base map. I found the SQL query tool used to select
objects very useful. Manifold editing of objects and attributes is
very easy. It's abilities to merge data via key matching or as already
georeferenced data is very useful - made it ease to merge a wide
variety of our data into a GIS context. (Found some inaccuracies in
our Lat/Long data that was very obvious on a map.)

Biggest problem I am having is not with Manifold but in talking with
others in the local GIS community we need to work with. Their
experience is mostly limited to ArcView and any other alternative
scares them. I did demo Manifold to a long time, open minded, planner
and he was amazed at Manifold's speed and capabilities out of the box.

Time will tell but Manifold looks like a winner to me!

[End Thread]

Back to Manifold Home Page