Anzir
I would recommend to you that you give Manifold a shot, for your domain
of work that would be best suited, it has an interface thats in my eyes
superior to ArcGIS. It is surprisingly cheap (200£ for the Universal
edition), given that it does basically everything you can do in ArcGIS
and/or MapInfo.
I use it daily for geodemographic analysis and create maps from that as
well. It runs under Windows only, but I must say a Mac is probably a bad
choice as a work tool if you are in the GIS world. if you own one of the
new Mac's though that now support Windows installation, then that should
be no problem.
PS: If you work in GIS for a living, I must say you should weight
carefully the pros and cons of using something "free", which is
potentially not as good, versus something you pay for but with which you
can be up and running quickly and earn money with. Any serious
consultancy job should bring in enough cash to pay for an ArcGIS or
Mapinfo license (even more so true for Manifold).
Anzir Boodoo wrote:
> Michael,
> On 9 May 2006, at 13:56, Michael Cartwright wrote:
>> Hello All,
>>
>> Just to let you know that the new poll is up. Last weeks poll
>> surprised us with ESRI dominating the results. For those of you who
>> choose “other” as your GIS would you please indicate what you use by
>> adding a quick post to this section of the forum?
> posting back onto GIS-UK because it might be relevant, I have not used
> GIS for about 3 years, being happiest and fastest with ArcGIS and
> having the longest experience with MapInfo. I now work independently
> (can't afford ArcGIS), and on a Mac, and have given GRASS a go - for
> someone used to point and click GIS, GRASS' user interface feels
> surprisingly clunky and not easy to use for the kind of work I do
> (digital cartography and geodemographic analysis) - I can't even work
> out how to display a layer once I've opened it. Can anyone out there
> recommend a GRASS course?
>
> (I've also tried the new open source JUMP - Java Universal Mapping
> Platform) and it looks promising if unstable).
>
> As for Google Earth, I think the detail of the aerial photography in
> some areas allows demographic researchers to get interesting
> qualitative information on an area. However, the quality of the other
> layers leaves a lot to be desired, especially when viewed in
> conjunction with the aerial photos, which themselves vary in quality
> from brilliant to useless.
>
> (as an example, my background is in transport, the roads dataset is
> mostly there but there are so many errors in the rail one it is almost
> unusable. Fortunately for that I can get data from other sources, but
> I do wonder about some of the data on services and amenities as a result)
>
> --Anzir Boodoo MRes MILT Aff. IRO
> transcience, 72 Staplehurst, BRACKNELL RG12 8DD
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