Useful (and free) data for Toucan Navigate

Our main objective with Toucan Navigate is to help people create meaningful maps very quickly. If you're looking for readily-available datasets, try these two web sites. Both provide useful and free data that can be downloaded and displayed in Toucan Navigate. Once downloaded, with just a few mouse clicks you can start viewing them over the roads maps and satellite imagery from Virtual Earth. You can also edit these datasets to fit your specific needs.

• GPS Data Team. This website has a large selection of POI (Points of Interest) from many countries. The image below shows Wal-Mart stores in the U.S, which were downloaded from their bulk download page. You will need to choose one of the .csv formats available and add a header row (Name, Longitude, Latitude).

• ESRI. ESRI offers free map data from the Census Bureau, which are very useful. You will find water bodies, census tracks and many other GIS files compatible with Toucan Navigate. ESRI also provides a simple way to download World Baseline Data in .shp format.

Download Toucan Navigate and start mapping your data now.

Toucan Navigate 2007 - Getting Started

Here's a quick tutorial on how to get started with Toucan Navigate 2007, which we've made available this weekend.

1. Download the bits by clicking on the download button here. It's only a 2 mb download (if you already have Microsoft's dot.net framework 2.0 installed).

2. Download, extract and save the sample files. There are three files (counties.dbf, counties.shp and fast food franchises.csv). These three files take up 1.5 mb of disk space.

3. Start the application and then select Add -> File from the Home (or the Format) menu and load the Counties file.

4. In the next step of the wizard, you will be prompted to select fields. Change only the Style field by selectingState_Name from the drop down list.

5. In the next step you can select a specific color for each or any of the States. Optionally you can just click Next and then finish once you have seen the preview. You should see all the counties now displayed on top of the Virtual Earth map.

6. Go to the Format menu. In the Object Style Section you should see one style for each of the States. You can now select a State and change its color by clicking on the Fill Color.

7. Now you can zoom in or out by scrolling your mouse wheel or dragging your mouse from top left to bottom right while holding the right button down (in) or vice-versa for zooming out.

8. If you want to make the Counties file semi-transparent, click the Edit button in the Map Layers group and then change the Transparency value from 255 to 100 or so.

You should now be looking at a map similar to this one:

Try the same steps with the Fast Food Franchises .csv file and select Company as the Style. You should be on your way to taking advantage of Toucan Navigate by now. If you still have issues please log your questions in our Toucan Navigate Forum.

Introducing Toucan Navigate 2007

This month we will start delivering the new version of Toucan Navigate (2007) to our clients and also introducing a free version. Our focus this time around has been on delivering an application that combines what is most attractive about internet mapping applications (i.e. on-demand detailed maps and satellite images, address look-ups and routes) with what's attractive about desktop applications (i.e. privacy, offline work, rich user experience).

Here's a video of the new Toucan Navigate.

Launching New Products at NCGIS 2007

Today we are introducing our next generation of geocollaboration products at the North Carolina GIS Conference with Microsoft's Virtual Earth team. We have two new products, GeoBlogIT and Toucan Navigate 2007, which incorporate valuable lessons learned from working with our clients, the team at Groove (now part of Microsoft) and the Strong Angel excercises.

We'll be talking about both of these offerings in the coming weeks.

Toucan Navigate 3 - a sneak preview?

While we've been adding some new features to the next version of Toucan Navigate, the GIS world hasn't been standing still. The explosion of interest in GIS, engendered by WorldWind and Google Earth hasn't gone unnoticed, neither here nor at Microsoft.

While Toucan Navigate 2007 will maintain its high-speed two dimensional view of the world for most things, we're thinking of incorporating Microsofts new 'SpaceLand' 3D mapping engine for those that need it.

Here's a screenshot. It also gives you an idea where we're going with Toucan Navigate 2007. We've got some other surprises planned, so stay tuned!

Connecting your GPS to Groove

We've developed a task-tray application to connect your GPS to Groove. It improves on the connection in Toucan Navigate 2.1 in a number of ways:

• Talks direct to Groove Forms rather than the Toucan Navigate app. This means it can work even when the Groove UI is closed.
  
• Transparently connects and re-connects to USB/Bluetooth GPS Units.
  
• Uses our 'Bambuco' scripting technology to make it easy to create flexible GPS apps.

It was used to good effect in the Strong Angel 3 exercises last week where we created a script to additionally generate SSE (Simple Sharing Extensions) data that was uploaded to a central server.

Existing Toucan Navigate customers can get a version now - contact Mark or Gabe.