Hillwalker News 2004/01

(follows 2003/14)

 

January 2004

 

Happy New Year! Well, yes, it is a bit late, but so is this first Newsletter; for the boring details see Personal Comments. Meanwhile there are three brand new products announced and various free upgrades. ISYS are committed to driving down costs to make programs available to as many people as possible. For many of you this will be your first Newsletter and you are especially welcome.

 In this Newsletter

PR0DUCT NEWS

 

NEW - MUNRO MAPS. MapWise Deluxe product, fully integrates other MapWise Deluxe programs. It also integrates with any version 4 Hillwalker or Hillwalker Lite, but especially The Munros, and upgrades them to version 5. This new product allows Munro-baggers the opportunity to plan their walks on OS Landranger Maps. The area covered includes all Munros and Tops and the approaches. Maps can be printed at 1:25,000 or 1:50,000. The program includes full Route Card capability. The cost? Just £25!

 

NEW - LAKES and PENNINES. Like the MUNRO MAPS, this new product fully integrates other MapWise Deluxe programs. It also integrates with any version 4 Hillwalker or Hillwalker Lite, but especially Lakeland Fells and Peaks, Moors and Dales, and upgrades them to version 5. This new product allows Lakeland and Pennine walkers the opportunity to plan their walks on OS Landranger Maps. The area covered includes all Cumbria, Lancaster and straight across England (the 460km northing) to the east coast, including Flamborough Head, and north to the Scottish border. Maps can be printed at 1:25,000 or 1:50,000. The program includes full Route Card capability. The cost? Just £25!

 

NEW - SOUTHERN UPLANDS. This has the same features as the above two programs and covers the area in between from the Border to Glasgow and Edinburgh, Arran and most of Kintyre and all of Gigha. Again the cost is just £25.

 

NOTE: If you already have maps covering these areas, there is no advantage in buying these new maps - unless it is for a present for someone else!

 

All the new programs are version 5.3.0.13. This new release looks very stable and has several new features including:

 And, Yes! they run on all Windows from 95 to XP.

 

ISYS are offering an upgrade to version 5.3.0.13 to all existing MapWise Deluxe users. The upgrade is on CD as the base files have changed, making a download too cumbersome. The upgrade CD costs £5 until 15 March but is free (except p&p) on orders placed after that date. The initial charge is purely to spread the update load.

 

The ISYS Charity Screen Saver is available for £5. The screen saver is the globe from MapWise International spinning against a background of twinkling stars. All profits go to AMYE, the Association for Young People with ME. We did sell some at the Dundee Mountain Film Festival but there are a few left. ISYS will send the Screen Saver, and anything else you order with it, at our expense, within the UK.

 

To existing users, ISYS offer the following MapWise Deluxe programs at prices below the advertised price:

 

 

 

To order any of the above, visit the website and use the Special Instructions in the Shop or email or call ISYS.

  

EVENTS

 2 to 4 April Outdoor Show NEC Birmingham

Unfortunately I have had to cancel all events until 1 April (see Personal Comments) but ISYS will be at the Outdoor Show in Birmingham on the Ordnance Survey stand. Some people have been asking if we will have tickets to give away again as we did last year. I am now hopeful that we will have some, but it will not be as easy as last year. I will give you more details as I get them.

 

 

On 12 January I gave a talk to BCS Glasgow (announced in the December Newsletter) and several of you came along and I hope enjoyed it. As a result of this liaison, if any of our users want to come to the BCS Dinner / Ceilidh on 20 March in the Holiday Inn Glasgow, you will be most welcome. Please give me a call. Dress is formal but the evening most certainly is not. Cost is £28 per person, always a great night.

  

HILL NEWS

Roineabhal was in the news again. Roineabhal, in Harris, is made of lovely rock for building roads and there are those who want to transport it to Europe for this purpose instead of leaving it where it has stood for the past few millennia. The Court of Session in Edinburgh ruled that earlier planning permission for excavation did not apply to the wholesale destruction now planned. So Roineabhal breathes again but it is perhaps worth a visit in case anything goes wrong and it disappears one night (or year).

 

 

Belford Hospital, Fort William, gave rise to considerable correspondence. The emergency unit was threatened with closure but the threat is now lifted. I can't help feeling that this is still one to watch.

  

COMPUTER NEWS

Bill Gates has been awarded an honorary knighthood for services to the software industry. He has been dubbed Sir Bill by the tabloids but of course as a foreign national (an alien!) he is not allowed to use the title. A group of computer geeks were discussing whether he justified this honour, and we decided that he had taken a lot of software writing jobs away but had contributed greatly to the amount of support that people needed. Honour was thus satisfied and we felt content.

 

Longhorn (the long awaited 64bit Windows) is well worth the wait according to Sir Bill. Surprise, surprise! (Is this a tabloid?)

  

HINTS AND TIPS

Winton in Perth suggests printing off the OS maps and placing the print in a freezer bag, which just happens to be about the right size. This keeps it sealed and protects the print from the rain. Ink jet prints will run if wet, rendering a once rather nice map quite useless.

I have been asked many times to explain the different kinds of Map. Well, here goes: A Vector Map is a 'join the dots' map. Because its structure, it is very versatile and it was even suggested to me that it should be call a fleximap. I think that this is a great name, but Vector Map is now well known and it does describe exactly what it is. The map can be drawn at any scale and layers are easily omitted. Woodland and contours are examples of layers which are usually excluded to increase drawing speed.

 

A Raster Map is like a photograph. Hillwalker has some supplied, particularly of the Cuillin ridge. MapWise Standard lets you add your own but own raster maps are specifically excluded from MapWise Deluxe, by request of Ordnance Survey.

 

An Image Map is map up of squares of mapping, joined together on the screen to give an appearance similar to a Raster Map. The difference is that the Image Map can scroll seamlessly across the whole country. Note that some other providers of maps do not permit scrolling across zones. Image maps can be scaled slightly from the designed scale. Beyond these limits, the information becomes unreadable.

 

Panoramas are available only in Hillwalker and show the position of hills relative to the observer.

 

Routes etc, planned and drawn on one map are automatically drawn on all open maps of the same area.

 

Click Fuzziness can be thought of as the size of the cursor. When you click a map (Raster, Image, Vector or Panorama), the program will look for a known point within click fuzziness pixels of the cursor. Basically, if it finds points that are too far away, reduce click fuzziness; if it misses points that you would like it to find, increase click fuzziness.

 

Setting click fuzziness to zero turns off the search and makes creating route cards much faster. Until now, click fuzziness could only be set in Main Menu | Initialize | Preferences | Fundamentals, in the new release there is a button on the Image and Vector Map allowing it to be set globally or just for that map.

 

PERSONAL COMMENT

I do not normally say personal things in the Newsletter, but the past few months have been exceptional. In January, after several months of 'upset', just the day after the talk to BCS Glasgow, I went to hospital for a Cholecystectomy (gall bladder removal to save Google a few searches from the 90 percent of users who are non-medical). It did remove me from the scene for a few days and it should have been longer except that of the five persons closely or loosely involved with ISYS, four have been out of action for different medical reasons for several weeks. Obviously ISYS is a dangerous company to work for!

 

You might remember that we kept having computer problems some time ago. We took an executive decision to solve the problems once and for all by replacing the three main computers: server, development and administration. All three new computers failed with different hardware faults: disc channel, processor and memory - and they were not all bought in the same place. And I expect everything to work, perfectly, first time out of the box. Patience is a virtue!

Finally, we had a software failure last week and the entire user database was corrupted. This was restored from various backups and just about everything was recovered. A small number of currently active records lost some information. Perhaps you could check the User Number of this Newsletter. If the User Number quoted is less than 3000 and you are a user, then please let me know your real user number and I will correct it. It might also be that you get a duplicate copy of the Newsletter. Again just send me the User Numbers of each, and I will correct for next time.

 

Support has now settled down, but there was a time when outstanding queries reached their highest ever levels. In the middle of this, one user asked for a lot of help and then offered the comment that not many people could be using the software if I could afford to spend so much time with just one person! 

 

I'm glad to have got rid of that lot. Just how we managed to create three new programs, attend the Outdoor Show in Islington a couple of weeks ago and keep The High Alps on track for an April launch I am not sure. The upside is that the program is now stable and has all the new features we wanted to have in and we now look forward to a good 2004.

 

PERPETUAL NAGS

Listen carefully; I will say this only once (would that it were true!)

 

If you need to contact ISYS Support, please always quote your User Number. We can then deal with the query quickly. We do love a challenge, but a request to change an email address to the one quoted with no User Number, Postcode, surname or old email was not easy. We did it though!

 

If you want to keep receiving this Newsletter, don't forget to tell me if you change your email address.

 

Are you a member of the Yahoo group yet? Here you can discuss any items within the Newsletter, any hill issue or any aspect of the programs.

 

Walk long and safely. 

 

Iain R White

ISYS Support

 

Low cost telephone number for ISYS sales and support: 0845 166 5701

e-mail sales@isysdirect.com or support@hillwalker.org.uk

Web: http://www.hillwalker.org.uk

Yahoo Group: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/hillwalker

 

Humour

A woman brought a very limp duck into a veterinary hospital. As she laid her pet on the table, the vet pulled out his stethoscope and listened to the bird's chest. After a moment or two, the vet shook his head sadly and said, "I'm so sorry, Cuddles has passed away."

The distressed owner wailed, "Are you sure?"

"Yes, I am sure. The duck is dead", he replied.

"How can you be so sure", she protested. "I mean you haven't done any testing on him or anything. He might just be in a coma or something."

The vet rolled his eyes, turned around and left the room, and returned a few moments later with a black Labrador retriever. As the duck's owner looked on in amazement, the dog stood on his hind legs, put his front paws on the examination table and sniffed the duck from top to bottom. He then looked at the vet with sad eyes and shook his head.

The vet patted the dog and took it out, and returned a few moments later with a beautiful cat. The cat jumped up on the table and also sniffed delicately at the bird. The cat sat back on its haunches, shook its head, meowed softly and strolled out of the room.

The vet looked at the woman and said, "I'm sorry, but as I said, this is most definitely, 100% certifiably, a dead duck." Then the vet turned to his computer terminal, hit a few keys and produced a bill, which he handed to the woman.

The duck's owner, still in shock, took the bill. "£150!" she cried,"£150 just to tell me my duck is dead?!!"

The vet shrugged. "I'm sorry. If you'd taken my word for it, the bill would have been £20, but what with the Lab Report and the Cat Scan....."

 

Thanks to Mike of Blackpool for this contribution.

 

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