The latest version of the Maptitude desktop GIS software from Caliper Corporation boasts many new features that support ease-of-use, which is one of the primary attractions to the product. Competitively priced, Maptitude 5 offers a mapping wizard that can be used by “anybody who needs to do mapping” i.e. someone with no familiarity with the software. The wizard allows you to input your table of addresses, plot your points on a map, label them, and thematically display and geographically analyze them on the map. The Display Manager toolbox allows for the viewing and control of the style, visibility, and label settings for all of the layers, selection sets, and feature display settings in a map.

“The display manager is a tool for accessing all of the styles in your map from a single floating window, greatly increasing the users ability to start using Maptitude right-away,” explained Stewart Berry, Maptitude product manager and GIS Specialist for Caliper.

For people who want to go beyond the basics, there’s the extensive online help plus a hard copy manual shipped with the product that includes many quick starts and tutorials.

A key feature of Maptitude is its free data. Caliper provides a huge amount of Census Data bundled with the product, and with the new release includes the latest ZIP Code boundaries. “We now ship the latest version of TIGER streets, ZIP Code points, plus additional Census MCD, SMCDs, and new demographics,” said Berry. “As of 2006 we have updated demographics for several levels of geography and also include new global datasets. You can create attractive looking maps for any place in the world out-of-the-box.”

Customers range from the Census Bureau who use Caliper’s mapping software to manage the next round of geography creation for the Census, to those in many sectors including banking, public health, community development, retail, real estate, sales and marketing.

According to Berry, one of the most significant features about Maptitude 5.0 is its completely redesigned interface, which includes Windows-standard features such as data undo and redo and dockable and resizable toolbars. The product supports ease-of-use “above and beyond” what it supported in previous releases. Included in the package are the latest ZIP Codes, the updated demographics, and major travel-based tools that allow the creation of bands based on distance, time, or other costs along street lines, plus the ability to assign roads to zones or districts based on proximity to point locations such as stores. This latter network partitioning tool allows you to use your facilities located on a map to partition the streets into their own trade areas based on travel time or costs across the street network. This allows you to create territories based on the streets rather than just areas.

Other new features include more flexible legends, improved thematic mapping, a geocoding tool for cities in the US and internationally, and file format compatibility with ESRI personal geodatabases, MS Access, Excel 2007, JPEG 2000 and Google Earth. Maptitude is compatible with Microsoft Windows 2000, XP and Vista, as well as many other GIS and database software.

With Maptitude you can connect to Google Earth so that you export a map image out of Maptitude and see it located in Google Earth. Alternatively, you can take a Google Earth image and see it as an image layer in Maptitude. “We also allow you to export to KML or KMZ so you can take your entire map and export every layer and then be able to open Google and manipulate those layers within Google,” Berry said.

Programmers will note that the Maptitude GISDK language now supports object-oriented programming, and Maptitude 5 is .NET enabled.