Discussion: Course Setting software question

This has probably been asked before, but does anybody know if CONDES or Purple Pen will work on a Mac?

If you have successfully used course setting software on a Mac and then either opened and printed from a PC, or exported courses to OCAD for printing from a PC, please share what works.

Nothing natively runs on a Mac. Run Windows in parallels, fusion or boot camp and you can use whatever you want. That's how I process everything. Purple pen on Windows and the illustrator on Mac for design and production.

I was tempted to set up my desktop pc and then remote in from my macbook...

Alternatively....OOM works on Mac and could draw courses, perhaps more crudely than PP.

OOM is definitely cruder than Purple Pen for course setting, from my experience, and probably not viable for much more than course sketching for informal purposes in practice. I use Purple Pen in VMWare on my Mac, no problems, including printing from my Mac or exporting a PDF for printing or viewing anywhere.

And Purple Pen more crude that Condes ;-) I use Condes in Parallels on my Mac - no problem at all. (other than paying for Parallels ;-)

Mm,maybe I should dig up my prehistoric license for CONDES.

I course set with ocad on a mac using parallels with windows XP. Print from ocad into pdfs for meets or just directly to local printer for training runs.

Thanks for the suggestions. It sounds like we can find something that will work.

Just to clarify, our club has a new course setter who uses a Mac. Ideally, he will be able to send me his course planning files in condes, purple pen, or ocad (rather than pdf), so that I can do some tweaking before printing, eg moving control numbers, cutting circles or connection lines, re-positioning control descriptions, etc.

I spent a dumb amount of time trying to get PurplePen to run in wine last night to no avail. I did get it to start occasionally, but that was as good as it got. :(

I recall a couple of threads on AttackPoint in which various orienteering software didn't run in wine. I've had reasonable success with Windows O programs and VMWare Fusion.

Yeah I may eventually get to that route if I acquire enough ambition to rustle up a Windows license.

I kick myself for not having Win 7 Pro on my desktop for the remote option, which would probably meet my needs for occasional times I travel and simply MUST design courses at the hotel. You know how that goes.

Condes isn't all that computationally demanding. It might both easier and more reliable to buy a cheap low spec windows machine. They are out there for a similar price to Parallels.

Our club has long had a laptop that gets passed around to the course setter for each meet. It has OCAD and Condes installed, plus holds map files and old course files.

Our club has long had a laptop that gets passed around to the course setter for each meet. It has OCAD and Condes installed, plus holds map files and old course files.

Nice. I've wondered when this will move online...a club web site with a web app that lets one draft courses.

Nice idea. Even more basic would be a web service that holds all a clubs maps, allows versioning control, provides access to club members together with information about access etc. Sweden seems to be going that way with an eventor add-on call OMaps.

That would be so amazing that I'm actually surprised we don't already have it - and frustrated every time I have to send a bunch of emails asking various likely people for the latest version. In software development we've had that exact system for decades

We have a corporate Dropbox account set up with all of our maps in it. Two people have admin access to the whole thing, and various other people have write access to certain folders (eg. The guy in charge of MTBO maps).

When people need a copy of a map, one of the admins sends them a short-lived link to the file. If someone's doing updates to a map they might be given write access to that folder.

Wouldn't take much to extend that to users being able to request maps automatically via the Dropbox API if you wanted to go down that path.

It's my understanding that Orienteering Ottawa is in the process of switching over to a proper version control system to manage map use.

Of course, one of the related issues is simple good file management - an area where I've seen many clubs struggle. Part of the problem is the lack of central version control of course and so you end up with multiple people updating multiple files. The other issue arises when maps get cropped and laid out for an event. People need to realise that this new file IS NOT THE MASTER FILE and therefore shouldn't have any map changes made on it. All changes need to be made on the master map and, if necessary, re-copied to the cropped event map. Anyway, rant over.

On the passing a computer with OCAD and Condes around... Condes is a club license so everyone on the club should be able to have it on their own computer. Not everyone needs OCAD, besides which there are free equivalents (i.e. OOM) that will serve most purposes just fine.

The other issue arises when maps get cropped and laid out for an event. People need to realise that this new file IS NOT THE MASTER FILE and therefore shouldn't have any map changes made on it.

Or better yet, educate them to use a secondary map file which loads the master as a background file and mask off the bits they don't want. Edit the master, automatically updated in the 'event' map, threaten to kill anyone who actually crops a map for no good reason. :)

Yes well.. that would work too I suppose ;)

Back to the earlier comment about passing a computer around. In this neck of the woods shared course setting is done in a shared dropbox file. Now you can return to the more important issue of mach archiving, version and access control. The OMaps system in Sweden now has about 400 maps in it. Access to the maps is via your Eventor login, which gives a rudimentary form of access management. So we in Australia can log in with our Australian Eventor credentials. Of course, Eventor knows we are not members of any Swedish club so we get very limited access beyond that.
I suspect the current version is in its early form and Mats probably has larger aspirations. But already it looks like a tool I wish we had here in Australia. Its clearly part of the way forward. But it needs more work to provide the sort of control I would feel comfortable with... at least separate access levels for view, read and modify.
Google OMaps.net and you can see the front end which has a master map showing the location of uploaded maps.

For now, there is a simple version control system. Share maps with club members in OCAD 11 or OCAD 10 format. Not many will access to this level of OCAD. So they can't fiddle with the map. They can see the map with Condes and use the layout tools it provides. Sharing files in OCAD8 format is asking for trouble.

OOM reads pretty much any version of OCAD file, though I did find that there were a few files it couldn't read.

I see a few people using Dropbox. Do any clubs use Google Docs for file sharing?

Yes, we do.

In any case, and in the meantime, someone developing macpurplepen would be much appreciated.