Map app gap snap!
Sine Nomine Software, who should be on stand 18 in the Cypress Suite of Saturday’s Wakefield Show according to the provisional floorplan, will be bringing a new version of RiscOSM along to the event.
The software, which uses data sourced and converted from OpenStreetMap, brings comprehensive mapping facilities to RISC OS, and was first launched at last year’s show. The way maps appear can be customised by the user by way of style sheets, allowing certain types of features to be highlighted or hidden; place names in the source data are indexed and can be looked up – which for the British Isles includes postcodes and OS grid references; many map features can have additional information displayed, including web links for further information still; GPS tracks can be imported; and much more.
The main feature of the new version – which won’t be available on the Sine Nomine website until some point after the show – deals with “handling multiple sets of data.” With the map data generally being supplied by Sine Nomine on a country by country basis, each country is therefore a separate dataset – i.e. a separate map. The new version is now able to handle the maps for several countries at once, and the data is merged as necessary for bordering countries, meaning it’s now possible for a map displayed in RiscOSM to cross a national border.
Additional new features include support for the Irish grid reference system, the RD (Rijksdriehoekscoördinaten) grid for the Netherlands, and Netherlands postcodes will be included in the data for the first time.
Joking about how frugal RISC OS applications and data tend to be, Sine Nomine’s Matthew Phillips commented in his announcement that “without video-editing software RISC OS users can have trouble filling modern hard drives” – a ‘problem’ they can help solve, by offering map data for over 30 European countries on a selection of SD-cards. Also available will be CD updates for the British Isles data.
And if your computer is too old to support CDs or SD-cards, if you pop along to their stand with a high density floppy disc, they will fill it (for free) with the map data for Andorra or Lichtenstein!
Finally, if mapping isn’t your thing, Matthew and Hilary will also have other software available – relational database Impact, as well as games SuperDoku, Wrangler and House of Cards.