ISYS OUTDOORS Newsletter 2006/07 - Ten Years since Version 1 In this Newsletter Hill News Competition to win MapWise v6.2 Win £40 Voucher for any ISYS OUTOORS Product Last Posting Dates Festive Opening Hours Tenth Anniversary of The Munros through Windows Some Bargains for you Transfer 500 waypoints to GPS How to send email to ISYS Computer News Hints and Tips Humour? This is the Newsletter for users of ISYS OUTDOORS Software: Hillwalker, MapWise, PhotoMaps and Alpiniste. Please do not reply to this Newsletter, as it will not be read. ISYS OUTDOORS contact details are at the end. If you want items for Christmas by second class post, you need to act today! HILL NEWS As predicted in the ISYS Newsletter years ago, the Cairngorm Mountain (what a horrible tautological name!) are now applying to allow more interaction with the open space at the top of the railway. They want to be able to take hillwalkers down from the top station. Harmless enough, it seems, but, if successful, this would be just the first of many applications to give free access to all travellers to the open tundra on Càrn Gorm COMPETITION TO WIN WORLD ON A CD v6.2 Who produced the first Atlas? Atlas's mum is not the correct answer. Well, what about Gerald Kramer (alias Geraldus Mercator of projection fame)? It was he who produced the first book of maps illustrated with the Greek hero, Atlas, holding aloft a globe, the eponymous atlas. However, his young friend and business associate produced an earlier book of maps without the Hero on the front. It was a book of maps but it was not called an atlas at that time. However, that does not prevent its being an atlas. The friend's name, and the answer to the competition, was Ortelius. Ptolemy produced a world map but it was not really an Atlas. Drawn from the virtual hat is Geoff Curnock of Kettering who wins a World on CD v6.2. WIN £40 VOUCHER FOR ANY ISYS OUTDOORS PRODUCT Prizes are getting better, so the question gets more difficult: How often will it have been one o' clock in the course of 2006? Answers, by email, to time (at) isysoutdoors.com by midnight 6 January 2007. The voucher is valid until 1 March 2007, but I think my £40 is quite safe. LAST POSTING DATES Do you want some ISYS product for Christmas? For you? For a friend? Here are the last posting dates: 16 December UK Second Class 19 December UK First Class Europe - wing and a prayer - the official date has passed! Please give us as much time as possible, and at least a day. FESTIVE OPENING HOURS In previous years, we have announced opening time but as most requests now come by email, we will not announce time this year. Email will be answered as normal up to and including Christmas Eve (Yes, a Sunday!). Service will resume on Boxing Day and continue until Hogmanay (Yes, a Sunday!). Service will then be permanently resumed on Monday 8 January 2007. TENTH ANNIVERSARY OF THE MUNROS THOUGH WINDOWS The world's very first outdoors CD was launched by ISYS for Christmas 1996. It was The Munros through Windows v1.0. It cost £79. Today that would buy you Hills of the British Isles, v6.2 which includes The Munros and about 4,000 other hills throughout the British Isles. The original Munros CD ran on Windows 3.1. Writable CDs cost £8 each, the CD writer cost £650 and it took nearly an hour to write at x1 speed. The launch was in the basement of John Smith, the Glasgow bookseller, who had been in St Vincent Street since 1890 but, alas, is not there now. In 2006, the building is an internet café. In those days, the maximum size of an integer was 16-bit allowing a number up to 32,000. This was not enough to hold the northings of a 10-figure grid reference, so we held only 6 figures, giving a precision of 100m. This caused a problem with Am Baistear and Fiacail a' Bhaisteir which shared the same 100m square in the Skye Black Cuillin. I had to move the Tooth to the next 100m square. Fortunately it was a virtual tooth! ISYS remains in the forefront of mapping software today. For example, only on ISYS software can you get georeferencing and plan routes on a crinkle map. Only ISYS lets you create an Image Map from a Vector map. Only ISYS integrates digital mapping and digital hillwalking guides. Version 1 still runs on Windows XP. Someone even registered a copy this week. Upgrades to version 6.2 are available for just £12.50 but v1 is a beautifully crafted program and users take a lot of persuading to upgrade. SOME BARGAINS FOR YOU We have some v6.2 MapWise 50 Central England and East Anglia CDs which have been badly printed but are fully functional. The area covered is from Lancaster to London and Swindon to North Yorkshire. Normally £65, these few CDs are being offered, unboxed for just £49 + p&p. Central England abuts the Lakes and Pennines area and slightly overlaps South East England, South West England and Wales. There is also a small batch of MapWise 50 Scotland CDs which have been printed with the wrong label. Again these few CDs are being offered, unboxed, for £49 each + p&p. These CDs are not offered on the website, so please call if interested. This is a once-off opportunity; any unsold CDs will be destroyed. TRANSFER 500 WAYPOINTS TO GPS Visit http://groups.yahoo.com/group/hillwalker and then Files to obtain the special version of GPSU to transfer routes of up to 500 waypoints. This software is still in Beta test and will be transferred to our website once a few more users have tried it on a variety of systems. If you use it, let me know how you get on with it. HOW TO SEND EMAIL TO ISYS Spam is running at about 3,000 per week so we rely entirely on the filters. Rejected mail is not even scanned by a human any more. We regret this, but we have to do some work other than deleting unwanted emails. So how do you get through? First, do not reply to this Newsletter. All the bounces and "I'm out of the office" emails are automatically deleted. Second, always put you User Number (given in the subject line on this email) in the subject line of the email you are trying to send to ISYS. Third, use the correct address. Here are the active addresses: support (at) isysoutdoors (dot) com - for registration and any help, sales or technical, for our users info (at) isysoutdoors (dot) com - for information about our products for non-users sales (at) isysoutdoors (dot) com - for sales If you receive this Newsletter directly from ISYS, you will always use either sales or support. Some organizations allow email only through their website. We are resisting this, but the day might come ... COMPUTER NEWS Remember Longhorn? Well, bits of it have become Vista, Microsoft's new Windows offering. There is some User interface improvement but the big things like file re-structuring are all ditched. Originally, Longhorn was scheduled for 2004 but Vista, the cut down version, will be available February 2007. Business Users can have it now. The really big thing is the support for 64-bit processors, but if you don't have a 64-bit processor, then it is not much use to you! Basically, it is coming soon, it is better but compared with expectation it is poor. And the most important thing? ISYS software runs on Vista, quite happily! We can expect to see it gradually replacing XP over the next few years. HINTS AND TIPS To find out how far it is from one point to another, use Mode | Bearings. Select the Origin and the Target and the full bearing information will be provided. Bearing is the azimuthal angle, that is the angle, in degrees, from north towards east and as far round as is required. The bearing uses Grid North if you are working on the British, Irish or Swiss Grids or any UTM grid. It is from true north is you are working in Lat/Long. In any case, convert to magnetic north if required. The other angle given is the inclination: the angle of the target above the horizontal as seen from the Origin. Angles below the horizontal are negative. Interestingly, the inclination of the Origin from the Target is not the same with a reversed sign. This is easy to understand if you think of standing on a hill and take a Bearing of a point at sea level on the sea horizon. The inclination will be slightly negative as, from a hill, the horizon is always slightly below the horizontal. The inclination of the back bearing is exactly zero. This effect is entirely due to the curvature of the Earth. In a flat world the two angles would be the same. If you don't believe me, try it out! The way the program feels and looks is controlled by many parameters. These can be viewed or changed in Preferences (or Preferences Tree) in the Initialize Menu. Some parameters can be changed locally by right clicking on, say, the Vector Map. If you change the parameter in Preferences, you will change it globally, and it will even be remembered across executions of the program. If you change it locally, it remains only until the Global value is substituted. Local values are not retained across executions or even to different copies of the Window (eg Vector Map). There is no need to change your email address when you change provider. Get a @hillwalker.org address for just £1 per month. Having resisted Christmas since about August, it is now time to celbrate! Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. Iain R White ISYS OUTDOORS www.isysoutdoors.com support (at) isysoutdoors.com 0845 166 5701 0141-943 1533 HUMOUR? GETTING MARRIED IN HEAVEN On their way to get married, a young couple is involved in a fatal car accident. The couple find themselves sitting outside the Pearly Gates waiting for St. Peter to process them into Heaven. While waiting, they begin to wonder; COULD they possibly get married in Heaven? When St. Peter shows up, they asked him. St. Peter says, "I don't know, this is the first time anyone has asked. Let me go find out." And he leaves. The couple sat and waited for an answer ... for a couple of months...and they discussed if they were allowed to get married in Heaven, SHOULD they get married, what with the eternal aspect of it all? "What if it doesn't work?" they wondered, "Are we stuck together forever?" After yet another month, St. Peter finally returns, looking somewhat bedraggled. "Yes," he informs the couple, "you CAN get married in Heaven." Great!" said the couple, "But we were just wondering, what if things don't work out? Could we also get a divorce in Heaven?" St. Peter, red-faced, slams his clipboard onto the ground. "What's wrong?" asked the frightened couple. "OH, COME ON!" St. Peter shouts, "It took me three months to find a priest up here! Do you have ANY idea how long it'll take me to find a lawyer? Thanks to Fiona from Fife for this piece of humour (With apologies to all priests and lawyers)