Toucan Navigate 2007 WebCast

October 18th, we're running a webcast in association with the Microsoft Virtual Earth team. We'll be talking about how Toucan Navigate 2007 integrates with Virtual Earth to make it easy to assemble maps from data in Excel spreadsheets, Groove Forms and SQL Server. We'll also be highlighting the options that using a web/desktop hybrid application offers over straight web applications.

If your work has a geographic element, and you need to work in a team with people who may be in different offices, or no office at all, or even different companies, then we believe we've got something interesting to offer.

Sign up here: Virtual Earth and Toucan Navigate for Offline Mapping & Collaboration

Bambuco Desktop 1.3 download ready

Bambuco Desktop is now available for download and to buy. This version incorporates the MapPoint address lookup engine directly and has a licensing application bundled with it. This version will run for for sixty days before requiring you to buy a full license, and each day is limited to twenty successful script runs.

You can find out more about Bambuco here, or visit the support forum here.

Support Forums address changes

I've wanted to update our support forums for a while now - mainly to make it easier to find things, to make them accessible via an RSS reader and to reduce the burden of spam administration that the old forums required. To that end, I've created a new set of support forums and set them to be the default destinations for support from the product pages. For now, they are at this address: http://infopatternslicensing.com/forums/. Once I'm happy that they're working as desired, I'll remove the old forums and redirect the existing web links to point to the new ones.

GPSTray updated

We're releasing updates and full versions of all our software this month, and first off the block is GPSTray. This application connects to your GPS and lets you use a Bambuco script to send your GPS location to Groove, SQL Server or to anywhere else.

If you've bought Toucan Navigate, contact us and we'll send you a copy of the update.

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.

Searching for Groove information?

Since Microsoft was 'acquired' by Groove Networks, a few thing have happened:

1. Forums-based support has moved to the main Microsoft community-based forums,
   
2. Lots of people within Microsoft have started blogging about Groove.
   
3. The Groove-specific documentation has been scattered all over Microsoft's web sites.

This has made it a lot harder to find all the relevant content that might help make your Groove-life easier. To redress the balance, I've spent some time this evening creating a Groove-specific search engine using the Groove Custom Search Engine. You can find it here.