Messages

1

TopoFusion Pro / MSR Maps will stay online!

« on: May 22, 2012, 11:25:37 AM »

I just received this good news via email.  I've not seen anything posted publicly on the MSR Maps site yet though.

Thanks to everyone who contacted us regarding their use of MSR Maps. We are going to keep the service going at this time - though the service will not be updated. However, we do need to move and upgrade the servers that are hosting the service today. This will likely cause some down time over the next few weeks. We will try to keep this down time as minimal as possible. Be assured, the service will come back up!

Thank you in advance for your patience.
Lori Ada Kilty
Program Manager
Microsoft Research Connections

2

TopoFusion Pro / Re: Contact Microsoft to bring back the map server

« on: May 14, 2012, 09:44:22 AM »

I just received this email from a program manager at Microsoft , so there might still be hope for the return of MSRMaps: 


"Doug,

Thank you for your interest in MSRMaps. We have been planning for some time to discontinue the service since there are other so many other options out there. However, as a result of your mail and several others, we are investigating ways to continue the service with some disclaimers. We will keep you posted on our progress."

 
(name withheld for privacy)

Program Manager, Microsoft Research Connections

3

TopoFusion Pro / Re: Contact Microsoft to bring back the map server

« on: May 08, 2012, 10:08:02 AM »

Email sent w/ v4.41.  I haven't tested it yet to see if topos and/or B/W aerials are working.  I am 90% sure B/W should work given that USAphotomaps still does.

I've verified both to be working in 4.41 as of this posting.

4

TopoFusion Pro / Re: Contact Microsoft to bring back the map server

« on: May 08, 2012, 06:25:48 AM »

The USAPhotomaps Yahoo group was where I initially heard of the shutdown, and where I found the email address to write to.  USAPhotomaps uses ONLY the MSRmaps data, therefore if the server goes down the program is dead in the water. 

5

TopoFusion Pro / Contact Microsoft to bring back the map server

« on: May 07, 2012, 07:18:13 PM »

I found this email address on another group for a similar piece of software, apparently it's a contact at Microsoft folks are getting in touch with to petition for the return of MSRmaps/Terraserver.  Not sure how far we'll get but can't hurt to ask.  If they know the service is used maybe they'll reconsider.

dan.fay@microsoft.com

He's Director, Microsoft Research Connections Redmond

Please send an email, maybe it'll do some good.

6

TopoFusion Pro / Re: Shape files display in the wrong geographic location

« on: May 04, 2012, 09:39:01 AM »

After further digging, I've determined that the PA government uses a custom datum to reference their shape files.  Which means their files must be converted to a standardized datum in order to be of use to anyone else.  Being almost completely GIS stupid, I'm trying to figure out how to do this.  If I had ARCgis I could probably do it in a couple clicks, however I don't so it should be super fun trying to get this mess straightened out.

At least it's not a Topofusion issue.

7

TopoFusion Pro / Re: Shape files display in the wrong geographic location

« on: May 02, 2012, 12:36:53 PM »

In looking at the data, it appears to have  been generated with ArcGIS 10, and the numbers it's coming up with for latitude and longitude are not even close.  It's like they're transformed into some other datum or somehow offset, rather than straight latitude and longitude.  Here's an example:

<rtept lat="1157776.34400910" lon="-575438.67574820"></rtept>
<rtept lat="1157783.01051301" lon="-575450.67574820"></rtept>
<rtept lat="1157790.34400910" lon="-575462.67574820"></rtept>
<rtept lat="1157797.67701691" lon="-575474.00924429"></rtept>
<rtept lat="1157804.34400910" lon="-575485.34274039"></rtept>

Not even close to valid lat/long pairs for PA.  I guess ArcGIS 10 stores this data in some oddball format?   I'm just trying to dump the shape file into a CSV of latitude/longitude pairs so I can build polygons of the state park boundaries.  The above output is from shp2text, a program that's supposed to dump the data from a shape file.  If that's the data that's being stored as latitude/longitude, then that's got to be one wierd datum they're using... or maybe it's offset somehow from a legitimate starting point.  I don't have ArcGIS so I can't load it up and see what's really going on.

8

TopoFusion Pro / Re: Shape files display in the wrong geographic location

« on: May 02, 2012, 12:01:09 PM »

The file can be downloaded here:  http://www.pasda.psu.edu/data/dcnr/DCNR_StateParks201109.zip

It's a shape file of all state park boundaries in Pennsylvania, but they show up in Topofusion in the northern part of South America.

BTW, a UTM zone boundary runs right through the middle of PA, but this is definitely a north-south issue, not east-west  (at least, not as far as I can tell being zoomed out as much as I am)

9

TopoFusion Pro / Shape files display in the wrong geographic location

« on: May 01, 2012, 05:21:04 PM »

It's probably just me not knowing what I'm doing, but when I load a shape file it shows up way off of where it should be geographically.  For instance, a shape file of state forest districts in Pennsylvania displays in Topofusion in South America.  It looks like the longitude is right, but the latitude is way off.  I did a quick search but didn't find anything on this.  Can someone please tell me what I'm doing wrong?  (I figure it's me because I never used shape files before)

BTW, I'm now on version 4.5 Pro if it makes any difference.  Thanks!

10

TopoFusion Pro / Re: Terraserver shutting down May 1

« on: April 12, 2012, 12:19:04 PM »

I believe you can download the "classic" topos in PDF form now, but that won't help you in Topofusion.  Unfortunately I don't have a link, but I'm guessing the USGS site would have more info.

11

TopoFusion Pro / Zoom in/Zoom out bug

« on: April 07, 2012, 07:16:32 AM »

I believe I found a bug in v4.41...  I tried to swap the page up/page down keys for zooming in and out.  When I did, the program would
only zoom in, but not out regardless of which key I pressed.  I checked the INI file and found that the correct values were written (33 and 34) so it seems that the program is perhaps using a hard coded value rather than the ones read in from the INI file.  Swapping them back to their original values worked as expected.  In other words, this works:
ZoomInKey=33
ZoomOutKey=34

but this does not:
ZoomInKey=34
ZoomOutKey=33

12

TopoFusion Pro / Terraserver shutting down May 1

« on: April 07, 2012, 06:20:05 AM »

Microsoft is taking down their Terraserver on May 1.  I'm not sure how much this will affect Topofusion, but I believe we'll lose access to some aerial and topo tilesets.  Sorry if this has been mentioned before, but firugred even if it was it's important enough to mention again.  If I'm wrong about losing tilesets, great!  But of not, I wanted to make others aware.  Here's the announcement link from Microsoft:

http://msrmaps.com/About.aspx?n=AboutShutdown

13

Feature Requests / User Maps -- a couple ideas

« on: December 10, 2011, 06:49:01 AM »

As I'm a relatively new user of Topofusion Pro, I may simply not be aware of these features if they exist, so please enlighten me if that's the case...

I've been importing user maps for state parks and game lands near my home.  One thing that would be really nice is if there was a way to rotate the maps inside topofusion.  Some maps aren't created with North up, so they're really whacked when imported.  I have been putting them in photoshop to rotate them, but I don't always get the rotation exactly right, so they're still off a bit in TF.  If there was a way to rotate them as they're displayed, it would be a piece of cake to get them aligned properly.

Also, may maps have extra "white space" that really can't be removed.  Since the land areas are almost never a perfect rectangle, the image files have margins that really add nothing to the display and in fact get in the way.  If there were some color value we could use in the image files that would appear transparent in the TF display, that would really be beneficial.  It would allow us to hide the white space in maps. 

So, in short, a transparent user map color and the ability to arbitrarily rotate user maps are what I'm suggesting.

14

TopoFusion Pro / Re: New Download

« on: December 10, 2011, 06:33:15 AM »

If someone is asking for money for a driver, you're probably hitting the wrong site.  A number of sites make drivers available for a fee, even though you can get them free from either the manufacturer of the PC or the actual card/device.  Check with the web site of your PC manfucaturer (Dell, IBM, HP, ,etc) first, as you should be able to get any updates there at no charge.  If you don't come up with anything there, then try the web site of your video card manufacturer.

 

15

TopoFusion Pro / Re: No Black Friday sale this year?

« on: November 25, 2011, 02:02:08 PM »

Registered Pro.  Thanks! 

16

TopoFusion Pro / No Black Friday sale this year?

« on: November 24, 2011, 07:09:03 PM »

Was kinda hoping there'd be one...  although I haven't seen anything anywhere.
Can't hurt to ask, right? 

17

Feature Requests / Re: Req: More options / locations on the GOTO menu

« on: February 23, 2011, 02:51:36 PM »

That did the trick!  Thanks!

18

Feature Requests / Re: Req: More options / locations on the GOTO menu

« on: February 23, 2011, 01:34:43 PM »

As a followup to the above request, I did a little more reading and found that I could change the city-small.gpx file to add more place names, and I've done so using the Populated Places data I mentioned in my previous post.  It works really well, with one small caveat --  now the city and town names show up all over the map and there doesn't appear to be any way to turn off their display.

The functionality to go anywhere easily is great, but not being able to see my map because of tons of small town names all over negates the usefulness.

So, here's an additional feature request -- give us the option of turning off the display of the city names that are read in from city-small.gpx.

19

Feature Requests / Req: More options / locations on the GOTO menu

« on: February 21, 2011, 11:56:35 PM »

The GOTO menu option should be a very convenient way to get to a specific spot on the map.  The coordinates option provides that -- if you know the coordinates.  The cities feature seems to be extremely limited.  It only seems to know about major cities...  but there are lots of more obscure places that I might want to go.

I propose/suggest/beg for this:
Integrate the "populated places" info from http://geonames.usgs.gov/domestic/download_data.htm (under the Topical Gazetteers subsection) into the GOTO menu.  We could first choose a state to narrow down the list, then choose a populated place by name.

For those of us in the US, it would make finding the locations of small towns much easier.  The format of the freely downloadable file contains the names of thousands of populated places and their coordinates, but the data might need to be massaged a little to work right.  (It's delimited with the "|" character)

Anyway, incorporating this data into Topofusion would make finding even obscure US towns or villages a snap.  It would mean no more hunting for the nearest large city or trying to look up coordinates manually somewhere else to enter into TopoFusion.

One other suggestion, although perhaps less useful, would be to have Zip Code  and/or Area Code lookups on the GOTO menu as well.  Personally, I'd find the Populated Places much more useful than either of those though.

20

TopoFusion Pro / A couple questions from a newbie.....

« on: February 18, 2011, 12:29:23 PM »

Since I just stumbled upon this software yesterday, I'm hardly an old pro...  but there are a couple features that I use a lot in another mapping/photo program and I either haven't found them in Topofusion yet or they're not there. 

One I use a lot (and have come to rely on) is a quick way to copy the coordinates where the mouse pointer currently is to the clipboard.  In the program I currently use, I press X and a little X is drawn under the mouse pointer, and a small dialog window pops open with the coordinates in various formats (Deg/min/sec, minutes decimal, degrees decimal, and UTM) each on a separate line in a memo field.  I just highlight the format I want, hit CTRL-C and copy the coords to the clipboard.  Makes grabbing positions quick and easy.  When the dialog window with the coords is closed, the little X marking the locationon the map disappears.  No need to mess with waypoints or anything, just a simple way to snag the current location.

I didn't see any way to do that in Topofusion.  The best I can come up with is to use the "Mark Waypoint" screen, but because the latitude and longitude are displayed in 2 different edit boxes I have to first copy the lat to the description field and paste it, then hit space, then copy the longitude to the description field, then paste it, then highlight both in the description field and copy them together and then close the waypoint box.  Not exactly quick and easy like pressing X would be. 

That brings me to another caveat...  I really, absolutely, positively hate entering latitude and longitude as two separate fields.  Copy and paste one, then copy and paste another...  it's a pain.  Another program I use (called GSAK from www.gsak.net) has a really smart coordinate input routine.  You just give it coords in pretty much any standard format and it figures out what you mean and accepts them.  I can feed it any of the following (in one edit field) and it's happy:  N40 11' 22" W76 21' 20" or 40 11.123 -76 11.213 or 46.334 -76.334 or N40.3343 W76.3322 etc....   I really wish that every program and web site that worked with coordinates had that same input capability.  Having to format everything just right and split the input into 2 different fields... ugh.  Call me lazy or spoiled, but once you have it so easy, it's hard to go back. 

Anyway, I'm still discovering features with Topofusion, and I really like what I'm seeing.  I just found the 3d view, very cool.  Although, I'm wondering what's the most accurate 3D representation -- setting the vertical exaggeration to 1?  I really would like a true, in scale representation of the terrain; I don't want to make a small hill look like the Swiss alps.

Ok, back to playing some more....   

21

Feature Requests / Re: Command Line Options

« on: February 17, 2011, 11:07:42 PM »

I guess it was a Black Friday sale you had going on...  I saw a post with a January date, thought maybe it was a New Years special, but looking again it referenced a sale on Black Friday 2010. 

22

Feature Requests / Re: Command Line Options

« on: February 17, 2011, 05:59:17 PM »

Hi,

Actually TF does have this capability.  If you pass it a pathname to a GPX file, with quotes surrounding it (this is how windows does it), it will load it up upon start up.

We have this functionality so you can drag and drop a GPX file onto the TopoFusion.exe and have it load it up.  I'd forgotten about it, but it's there.

So, if GSAK does things in the windows way with the quotes, it should work.  If not, please let me know and I'll change it to accept both with and w/o quotes in the next version. 

Thanks.

Actually GSAK is very flexible and I was able to get TopoFusion to launch and open a GPX file without too much trouble once I realized TopoFusion had this capability.   After playing around with this program I can see it's one I'm going to have to add to my arsenal.   Too bad I missed out on the promotion earlier this year.... 

23

Feature Requests / Re: Command Line Options

« on: February 17, 2011, 06:51:35 AM »

I just found out about Topofusion today, and it looks like and almost perfect replacement for a program I currently use called UsaPhotoMaps.

My only concern is that there doesn't seem to be a way to call Topofusion from the command line and have it open a GPX file to plot the points like USAPhotomaps does.

I'm a geocacher and one of the things I need to do is view multiple points on various maps quickly.  I use a database program called GSAK to store the points and manipulate the data, but GSAK has no ability for map viewing.  It can, however, launch other programs to view maps by writing a GPX file with the waypoints then launching the map program.

If it would be possible to have Topofusion automatically launch and open a GPX specified on the command line, that would be perfect.  I'm not yet a registered user, and as this is probably the feature I'd use on an almost daily basis, I'd like some feedback as to whether or not this could be implemented.  Looks like you've got a great program here, add a way to automate it a bit and it would be perfect!