First day back in the office after an exhausting weekend attending the WhereCampEU unconference here in London.  The conference was really well organised, with great venues and food, and all that at zero cost thanks to very generous sponsors and a great bunch of volunteers! Also thanks for the free beer at Smithy’s sponsored by Axon Active, I thoroughly enjoyed the pub evening.

Attendants came from over 13 different countries, with public and private sector attendants, web2.0 startups, core OpenStreetMap people and a strong presence of academics, specifically UCL!

Slowly, people seem to be uploading their presentations to the wiki, allowing a more complete view of the content presented. Altough in retrospect, I might have made some bad decisions regarding which sessions to attend, my conference highlights included definitely the Skobbler presentation, the Zen of Map Quality , and Steven Feldman’s business model workshops. On the Saturday afternoon, Bob Barr passionate analysis of the current and future state of the Ordnance Survey made for a great closure to the conference. I didn’t make it to the post conference drinks on Saturday.

Overall, I would have wished for less Openstreetmap presentations, at times it felt like a dress rehearsal for the SOTM2010 !!! But, I will definitely return to WhereCampEU 2011, as it is a great opportunity to network with a wide array of relevant players in the geoweb industry and OSM community.

For the past 6 years the web forum Georeference has been the hub of the Manifold GIS user community, providing a virtual gathering place for users, enabling the development of a vibrant online community of expert users, sharing knowledge, discussing wider issues and helping novice users on a level that is very rarely encountered in other support forums. I believe it is fair to think that for many users of Manifold GIS, it is the first port  of call when looking for information, help and advice with the software, before making use of paid support from Manifold directly. So as more licenses of Manifold are being sold and used , the number of forum users, posts and threads should increase in parallel. Given this premise, forum activity levels then act as a very imperfect proxy for the market penetration rate of the Manifold GIS software package. There are of course several caveats* to this theory.

The forum thankfully records and shares usage statistics (number of posts/threads per month). I assembled and visualised the growth in terms of forum threads and posts over the past 6 years in the graph attached below. In order to give some context, I also included the release dates of significant versions of Manifold on the graph.

One very fundamental observation from this graph is that since  Manifold v8 has been released, there has been a decline of activity on the forum. Whereas in the preceding years, there was almost uninterrupted growth in user forum activity, right now, over two years after the release of v8, the forum contributions have returned to the level of mid 2006, and trend doesn’t imply a return to growth.Also notable has been the gap between the software release cycle prior to v8, and after. Whereas Manifold used to bring out a major revision each year (2004,2005, 2006,2007), for the past two years, users have been waiting for Manifold v9.

Given the caveats detailed below, what conclusions can the graph give us on the general business development context of Manifold?

I believe it is fair to say that CDA, the company developing Manifold GIS, are a high-tech software company (i hesitate to use the term start up, as they have been on the market for 8-10 years), which have a disruptive product, challenging the established GIS market in terms of pricing structure (and some may argue in terms of software quality/features). The study of disruptive technology innovations has been formalised in a number of theories, one very prominent one being the “Crossing the Chasm” model. This model aims to explain the specifics of marketing of high-tech products, and distinguishes two crucial stages: First, the product is marketed to and adopted by “visionaries”, a small set of users which form a small base of early adopters of the product. In order to gain mass market adoption though, the company crucially needs to gain enough momentum to jump the proverbial “Chasm” towards the pragmatists (early majority). A step at which many high-tech companies ultimately fail!

Manifold certainly has achieved a core basis of highly motivated early adopters which act as voluntary technology evangelists, as evidenced by the very supportive online community, as well as a number of user initiated meetings. From this basis, Manifold has over the past 4 years been working to gain momentum to cross the chasm towards the early majority in the GIS market, rapidly issuing improved software versions, opening a partner centre in Silicon Valley, starting to issue press releases and other media related activities. The success of these measures though lies in the continued rapid pace of updates being sold, given that Manifold do not levy annual maintenance fees from its existing user base.

In my opinion, as of right now, CDA Int. Ltd. are stuck in a limbo between an established early adopters user base, and the early majority user base they are trying to reach in order to significantly advance their market penetration. While they seem to be struggling to finish version 9, their existing user base seems to be eroding, increasingly frustrated by a lack of updates and activation issues, while many of the early majority users, more technically conservative, are holding back from buying in to Manifold, waiting to see what v9 brings to the table.

*Important caveats complicating the estimation of the number of users/licenses from forum activity levels :

1. Not every user of Manifold is an active participant to the forum. Most likely only a very small percentage of Manifold users ever contribute to the forum.
2. Most users will only participate when they have a problem/question they need advice for.
   
3. A given person might be responsible for a varying number of Manifold licenses. This can range from one user with one license, to one administrator who is responsible for hundreds of licenses installed across a company, or embedded as a software component invisible to end users.

First, Dimitri goes into a lot of detail about the fundamental software development challenges for GPU programming, much of which is over my head in terms of technical detail. Sadly, all the examples in this presentation refer to raster processing, which is already present in Manifold v8.

The second half of the talk is clearly more interesting, as he presents fundamental architectural work developing a lightweight processing scheduler. This scheduler seems to be the key infrastructure element enabling efficient workload paralellisation, enabling Manifold to optimally leverage a heterogeneous environment of multiple CPU’s and GPU’s. One thing that seems to be clear from this presentation is that Manifold over the past two years have been very busy rewriting large parts of their core code to enable the paralellisation of almost all GIS tasks inside Manifold. Particularly interesting is the mention at the end that they are in a position to take advantage of any GPGPU platform (Nvidia and AMD), which implies the adoption of OpenCL by Manifold for their next release.

A great mention as well for Manifold as one of the GIS packages supporting PostGIS in the video by Paul Ramsey, although he alleges to some FUD that Manifold the company spread regarding PostGIS ( at 13:15 in the video, although I don’t remember what particular Dimitri postings he was referring too

According to Paul’s presentation, PostGreSQL (with PostGIS) certainly seems to be at least equal to other spatially enabled databases in terms of feature completeness, performance and robustness, and its free, making procurement much easier (19:00 min in video). And the new release of PostGIS seems to be all about speed improvements, which is obviously a good thing. A overview of the roadmap ahead for PostGIS promises a lot of things to come…

Now, my interest in PostGIS has only started lately, mostly because I was asked to develop a “Introduction to Spatial Databases” e-learning course. Given the need for students to be able to run the practicals on their home computers, we chose PostGIS and Quantum GIS as the software tools for the tutorials. I must say I have been impressed by the functionality of PostGIS, and it certainly hasn’t been a very steep learning curve for me, thanks mostly to my previous Spatial SQL knowledge learned from Manifold’s Spatial SQL experience. Although the syntax and some of the commands are slightly different between PostGIS SQL and Manifold Spatial SQL, knowledge of either is really helpful when trying to write queries! Wider issues of optimisation such as spatial indexes though present another level of complexity/power in PostGIS,  which Manifold’s internal SQL engine doesn’t expose to the user.

The invitation is also available in PDF format with a detailed agenda

The Department of Civil, Environmental and Geomatic Engineering, University College London, will be hosting an Introduction to Geographical Information Systems and Cartography Course on the 18^th and 19^th of February 2010. This course is aimed at novice or potential GIS Users interested in key concepts of geographical data capture, storage and analysis. After course completion participants will be able to generate, manipulate and analyse geographic information confidently and create high-quality cartographic outputs.

The course is organised into modules containing comprehensive overviews of fundamental topics relating to Geographical Information Systems, databases and cartography, alongside hands-on tutorials teaching participants the most important functionalities of GIS.

The course will introduce users to and use Open Street Map (OSM) data and Manifold GIS software. Participants will be tutored by leading GIS lecturers and researchers with extensive GIS expertise in a commercial and academic context.

Participants will receive a comprehensive training manual containing all of the course content such as presentation slides, tutorial worksheets, project files and datasets used. This training manual will act as a valuable reference guide after the course is completed.

Each participant can expect:

• Experienced academic tutors
• A workstation preloaded with all software and data for the tutorials
• State-of-the-art air-conditioned computer room
• Comprehensive course documentation folder
• Course Certificate from UCL on completion
• Lunch and refreshments provided

The course fee is £650 (incl. VAT) per participant. Please note that we have arranged a discount for organisations sending two or more participants. The course will be held on UCL’s main campus in Bloomsbury, Central London.

For booking and any further enquiries, please email Patrick Weber at p.weber@ucl.ac.uk or you can phone +44 (0)20 7679 2745 .

Just a hint: I am approaching on the motivation chart the point entitled: “Advisor runs out of funding” ….

Having decided on a basic methodology for the decision making process, we are now in the process of developing UI mockups, which we can present to stakeholders to get their opinion of the system. UI mockups allow an early view on the look & feel , i.e. usability of the system, and allow the designer to easily collect feedback from users and integrate changes without having to modify/rewrite code.  For my project, I also hope that I can give stakeholders a better understanding of the system development process and of the project’s main aims through this showcase.

I have been looking at different methodologies for producing such UI mockups, and how they have been applied to GIS & SDSS type projects. I must say that I have only found sparse evidence of systematic efforts by GIS practitioners to apply usability principles through the use of mockups  in GIS development activities. My view also is corroborated by Muki in his recent blog post, where he argues that usability and the processes in software development that ensure good usability still seem to be considered a nice to have, and the GIS industry lacks a “usability culture“, inherent other industry sectors.

But I digress…  As always, there are multiple methods of doing UI mockups. One of the most straightforward and widely used methods uses paper, pen and scissors to physically create the UI elements, which can then be arranged into an UI mockup. This of course is very flexible as you can easily create and assemble together whatever user interface elements one needs or wants.A digital equivalent is to use PowerPoint or any other general purpose drawing tool to generate the UI mockup. But there are also drawbacks. Physical UI mockups can get lost/destroyed, are not easy to revise, and changes can’t easily be tracked. Digital mockups made with PowerPoint are also cumbersome to generate, and one needs to invest a lot of time into generating basic UI elements (altough some templates to get you started are available). With PowerPoint mockups, you can even generate basic interactivity inside the mockup by creating links between slides, altough this is still cumbersome.

Obviously, a specific quick and dirty design tool for mockups would be great, and thats exactly what I found with Balsamiq Mockups. They have both a free online tool version as well as a desktop application version available, which supports features such as dynamic links between screens. Also, Balsamiq Mockups intentionally uses hand-drawn UI elements to generate “paper quality mockups“, so that people don’t get attached to “that pretty color gradient” or think that your mockup has actual code behind it and is “practically done”.

I just spent the afternoon creating such a mockup for my project, and I am more than happy with the results, even though they only offer a basic “map” element which is specific to GIS. But the rest of the template of pre defined UI elements is rich enough to model most GIS related UI.

I would urge any GIS developer who hasn’t used mockups for their application development process before to give it a try and enjoy the benefits of better usability for their applications and happier users!

Even so, it is when working with other Manifold users, and specifically teaching Manifold to new users, that one can often find basic usability issues at hand that go unnoticed by more seasoned Manifold users like myself. In this post, I do not want to address larger and more complicated issues, but instead focus on providing a small list of low hanging fruit that could easily be fixed by the Manifold development team:

1) Setting Area of Interest in Layouts

During our training course, almost all new users needed help to understand how to set the area of interestof a layout. The way to change the AOI of a map component in a layout might be powerful, but is complex and well hidden from the user in multiple steps. Most users will upon the creation of a layout from a map, expect the zoom extent of the layout to be the same as what they see in the map component. Confusion sets in when the whole component, or worse a blank page, greets them when they open their newly created layout. “Hey where’s my nice map gone?”

The process then is less than straighforward and involves in total 8 steps and at least as many mouseclicks : right-click on the layout (1) and choose properties (2), set the Scope to Locked Rectangle (3), go back to the map component (4), goto View -> Panes -> Layers (5) (as that pane is hidden by default!), using the Layers Pane, enable the Layout Component extent rectangle (6), resize to the AOI the extent rectangle (7), finally go back to the Layout (8).

Ideally, users would expect after selecting a layout map component that it would behave like a regular map component where users can pan and zoom to set a AOI for the layout.

2) Formatting toolbar

Most new users will stumble over one of the more fundamental idiosyncrasies the Manifold user interface has to offer. The concept of the formatting toolbar relies on the fact that, as opposed to other GIS packages, one drawing can contain different geometry types (points, lines, areas). This is reflected in the formatting toolbar, which always offers the user formatting options for all three geometry types. Because the formatting options look very similar to one another, new users are often deeply confused and unshure which icon they need to click to influence for example the line foreground color.

One straightforward solution would be to blank out formatting options for geometry types not currently present in a specific drawing, thus simplifying the toolbar considerably (for a lines only drawing, this would reduce the number of icons from 17 icons down to 4!).

Another possible solution would be to indicate through a small text box what geometry type a set of formatting icons refers to, instead of relying on users to find the right option by hovering over an icon or trial and error.

3) Label Display Options

When working with labels, users are often at a loss on where to change advanced options such as callouts, label overlap conflicts and line label placement. Users in general will look first in the component specific menu, i.e. the Labels Menu, where they wont find a entry for such advanced display options. Instead, Label display options are “hidden from the user” in the generic View Menu. The same applies to for the display options of surfaces and images.

IMHO it would make much more sense to group all options relating to a specific component type in the specific Menu for that component, i.e. the “Labels” Menu or “Surfaces” Menu.

4) Queries in Layouts

A table dragged into a layout results in the creation of a layout component displaying table records. This makes sense to the user and he is pleased to be able to include tabular data into his layout to generate reports.

Unfortunately, the same doesn’t happen for queries dragged into a layout. From Manifold’s perspective, the software sticks to its principles and generates a layout component containing the SQL Query text. 99% of the time, this isn’t the most useful behaviour, and a user would rather expect the query results table to be generated and placed into the layout.

It would be much better if users were given a choice if they wanted the query text, or the query results to be included in the layout. (The workaround I currently employ in this situation is to run a query which generates a table which in turn is included in a layout, which is fine except you can’t update the table easily without deleting it and rerunning the query, thus loosing the layout position).

5) The Query Toolbar

Finally, this one was already touched upon by Muki on his blog,  but it is worth repeating his comment here, as the change is the most straightforward to implement on this list:

The way the query toolbar works is that you select a field in the left drop-down list, an operator at the central drop-down and a value in the text box on the right and click on select to see the result. For example, if you enter 5 in the toolbar in the picture, it will lead to a selection of the 5 polygons on the map with the smallest area.
The confusing part of the interface is the ‘not’ between the left drop-down and the central one. For a new user, the interface reads ‘find objects on the map where the field Area (I) are not the bottom X’. The ‘not’ in this case is a toggle button that can be activated to negate the operation that was selected in the central drop-down. Clearly, it would be better if, when not activated, it had the word ‘is’ (Area is the bottom 5) and ‘not’ appeared only when it was active. This is one of the cases where usability enhancement could be carried out in less than a minute of a programmer’s time – and surely makes life less confusing to many novice users…

As you might have guessed, these are only some of the usability issues one can find in Manifold, and I would appreciate any comments here if you can think of others. I have already send in suggestions to Manifold for most of these issues, and I would urge you to do the same if you can agree with my analysis.