Archive for the 'Uncategorized' Category

By Chris Brigger, Global Training Content Manager

Many customers have told us that budgets for travel and training are shrinking, making alternative training methods important.  In response, the PBBI Education Department is working on developing a series of online tutorial video clips. The short clips focus on a specific task or feature of various aspects of our software.

Our first series of online tutorials were posted to support the launch of MapInfo Professional version 10, and focus on the new user interface elements. These can be located online at: http://www.pbinsight.com/support/training/video-tutorials/. In the coming months, we will expand our online library to include tutorials for additional PBBI products.

MapXtreme Java 4.8.2: Improving rendering quality

by: Minna Lunney

Obtaining the best looking maps possible starts with high-quality vector data and rasters, but is also heavily influenced by the rendering engine and style settings.  Below are a couple of simple tricks you can use within MapXtreme Java to enhance the quality of maps displayed on screen or saved as an image.

Enable Anti-aliasing

Anti-aliasing adds gray or colored pixels to blend with the original pixels within an image, resulting in lines and edges that are less jagged. This feature can be enabled within the Web and StandAlone Managers, as well as within your Java programs.

To use anti-aliasing with the MXJ Manager (Web or StandAlone), follow these steps:

1) Browse to [MXJ_Home]/bin and open MapXtremeJavaManager-Web.lax or MapXtremeJavaManager-StandAlone.lax for editing.

2) Add the following lines to the end of the LAX file:

#

# ENABLE ANTI-ALIASING

#

lax.nl.java.option.additional=-Dcom.mapinfo.render.quality=true

3) Save and close the LAX file.

Within an MXJ program, you can direct your ImageRequestComposer object to use anti-aliasing with the following line of code:

myImageRequestComposer.setRendering(Rendering.QUALITY);

Below are screenshots that illustrate the difference anti-aliasing makes.

Without anti-aliasing:

Without Anti-Aliasing

With anti-aliasing:

With Anti-Aliasing

Adjust line caps and joins

This is a technique for maps that contain line features, such as highways.  Line renditions share a number of properties, but two in particular are of interest here: stroke-linecap (what the ends of a line segment should look like) and stroke-linejoin (what the line should look like at the junction of two segments).

Here are the available stroke-linecap options:

available stroke-linecap options

Here are the available stroke-linejoin options:

By default, MXJ line styles will use “butt” for stroke-linecap and “miter” for stroke-linejoin.  This may lead to jagged roads, especially at higher zoom levels.

To remedy this, open the MDF for the map in a text editor.  Find every instance of the words “miter” and “butt,” and replace them with the word “round.”  For example, the following style tag:

<style fill-opacity=”1.0″ stroke=”#990000″ stroke-opacity=”1.0″ stroke-width=”2.0″ stroke-linejoin=”miter” stroke-linecap=”butt” stroke-dasharray=”none” marker-continuous=”none” parallel-line=”none” symbol-mode=”font” symbol-foreground-opacity=”1.0″ symbol-background-opacity=”1.0″ />

Would be changed to this:

<style fill-opacity=”1.0″ stroke=”#990000″ stroke-opacity=”1.0″ stroke-width=”2.0″ stroke-linejoin=”round” stroke-linecap=”round” stroke-dasharray=”none” marker-continuous=”none” parallel-line=”none” symbol-mode=”font” symbol-foreground-opacity=”1.0″ symbol-background-opacity=”1.0″ />

Once this is done, save and close the MDF, then try rendering it again.  You should see that the lines are much smoother.

At this year’s insights ’09 user conference, we shared the stage with Microsoft and demonstrated how organizations can “power up” their Bing Maps to make better decisions using spatial analysis.

Developers were particularly interested in learning how our MapXtreme^® software development kit turned the maps generated through Bing and Google into powerful business tools. In a sense, making it easy for developers to transform cartographic images into true location intelligence.

While there are clear advantages to comprehensive desktop applications such as MapInfo Professional, Web 2.0 does provide an environment where you can interact and modify your map tile images instantly. So it’s not surprising that the use of low-cost, web-generated imagery offered through Bing Maps (formerly Virtual Earth) and Google is common.

What’s missing from Bing and Google? Two things. Your data and a powerful analytics engine. That’s where MapXtreme comes into play. No matter how much you can accomplish in a browser, you need to do more if you want to make decisions that will advance your business.

Consider a retailer choosing a site for their next location. After you plot in your existing sites, you may want to overlay competitors, customers, market demographics, use SQL JOIN clauses, create buffers, run point-in-polygon analyses and more—that’s where middleware and enterprise mapping comes in to play.

SDKs like MapXtreme allow you to integrate your own data and conduct complex spatial analysts. A tile-based Rich Internet Application architecture ensures that map retrieval is fast, client side interactivity high, and server-side processing reduced.  Designed for enterprise use, the tile-based approach provides for the navigation of sophisticated quantitative data in a consistent and intuitive manner—without sacrificing cartographic quality.

Tile servers are becoming increasing popular for web mapping because they allow the application to pre-render parts of the map and store them as images. The ability to combine web, proxy and private caches based on site and user needs provides developers with many options and possible configurations.  In other words, with the right tools your favorite mapping applications can now do the heavy lifting needed to solve today’s complex business challenges.

For more information on MapXtreme please download our free eval at:

http://www.pbinsight.com/welcome/mapxtreme7

All of us on the MapInfo Professional team are busy traveling throughout the summer and fall  to visit customers and introduce them to MapInfo Professional v10.0. Our events may vary slightly from region to region, but the one thing that remains constant is our enthusiasm to show customers what’s new!

These events also allow us to reach out and talk to users like you so that we have a clear understanding of what you’d like to see in future versions of MapInfo Professional.

To see where we’ll be next in the US and Canada  Click Here

If you’re in the UK or Ireland don’t miss our MapInfo User Group – for information Click Here

If you’ve been reading our blog the past few months you know that we have been posting quite a bit about MapInfo Professional v10.0. Our fully functioning 30 day evaluation has now been posted – download it at:

www.pbinsight.com/ten

MapInfo Professional v10.0 includes:

• Greater Ease of Use – A more intuitive user interface and data sharing via layered PDF enables organizations to more easily and efficiently create and share customized maps, resulting in greater efficiency and time savings.
• Cost Savings - MapInfo Professional 10.0 supports PostGIS, an open-source database, providing users with a cost-effective, open source alternative.
• Enhanced Data Access - Organizations can tap into even more data including Microsoft SQL Server^® 2008, giving organizations even greater flexibility and continuing access to multiple forms of data.

To view a webinar that provides an in depth demo of  the new features and functionality click here.