MapInfo Professional 10.5 to feature enhanced GPS tracking Functionality

Blue Marble Geographics exhibited at the Pitney Bowes MapInfo Business Insight conference last week in Miami, Florida. The highlight was a successful demonstration of the newest version of Geographic Tracker for MapInfo Professional 10.5. The Geographic Tracker is a GPS application that supports streaming live GPS position data, playback of recorded GPS log files and transfer of spatial data both to and from various GPS units. The tool ships as a free install in MapInfo Professional. Blue Marble’s geospatial data manipulation and conversion solutions are used worldwide by thousands of GIS analysts at software companies, universities, oil and gas companies, civil engineering, surveying, technology, enterprise GIS groups, government and military organizations.

The Geographic Tracker GPS interface control has shipped in every version of MapInfo since 1995. The version 4.0 update, to be released with MapInfo Professional 10.5, will include a new look and feel, and expanded support for Garmin, Magellan, Trimble and other GPS units. The tool allows you to create profiles for multiple GPS units, import and export route and track data between MapInfo tables, GPS units, and GIS data formats, and save data as points, lines or polygons. The new version also allows users to calculate an offset from the location of the GPS during collection, which is handy if you are gathering data on roadside objects in a moving vehicle or some similar workflow.

Blue Marble also demonstrated features for upcoming releases of the Tracker including GeoRSS support for services such as Twitter. It will also incorporate a Smartphone application, attribute and position data transfer via remote units and enhanced support for Magellan GPS units. Blue Marble’s exhibition at the Map Insight conference was a live demonstration of the social location services, tracking location messages from multiple employees in the US and Canada via their Twitter accounts.

“Many, many users approached us to ask a variety of questions on the new functionality of Tracker,” stated Blue Marble Product Manager Sam Knight. “They were particularly pleased with the expanded GPS support and the ability not only read data but also to write to the units. Users are also excited about the remote tracking functionality coming later in the year.”