Topics

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 / 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.

3

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!

4

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

5

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

6

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.

7

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? 

8

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.

9

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....