Discussion: Recommend a laptop/tablet for exclusive mapping use?

I've got a Mac- so I can't run Purple Pen, OCAD or any of the awesome orienteering-related software it seems. I could install software that "mimics Windows" on my Mac, but I already max out my Macbook Pro with tons of video footage as it is.

Can you recommend a laptop or tablet that is:
-less than $1000 (hopefully closer to $500)
-lightweight enough to be easily portable
-rugged enough to take into the field
-& of course, can run PPen, OCAD, etc with no problem.

I'd rather have it be light than rugged if that's a deciding factor.

Thanks!

iPad 4G with Greg Walker's GhettoCAD. This doesn't solve the Purple Pen and OCAD issue, but I think it's probably the best portable mapping tool.... and you'll have an IPad, too.

Can I install "Windows" on top of an iPad?

iPad would also be awesome for on-the-scene blogging & video updates!

Just about to say the same - greg's AP name is biggins. You'd have to contact him with an iPad's Device ID to try it out - so find a friend with an iPad!

Also, saw your website on that 'novice question' thread. Great work, keep it up!

Can I install "Windows" on top of an iPad?

No, but you can throw your iPad out the window, after which it still might be more useful than attempting to run Windows on it.

I just bought a Fujitsu Q550 tablet on ebay with the idea of using it for field checking. They run windows 7 professional and you should be able to snag one for $450-$500 (or less), even though the retail is closer to $800-$900. With that said, I haven't put OCAD on it yet and haven't tried field checking with it yet but that is my intention. They do come with a 2 cell or a 4 cell battery and they claim 8-10 hours of use with the 4 cell though it's probably less if the screen has to be turned up bright. Also, they come with 30 GB or 62 GB hard drives. Here's a link to one selling now that I'm guessing will go for less than $500.

http://www.ebay.com/itm/150828573571?ssPageName=ST...

For fieldwork: iPad + GhettoCAD. You'll want the iPad with GPS (not on the base model). The cheapest new iPad option is $629, with the previous model at $529. The phone has wireless capability, too, but you can skip that. If you need it to be rugged, just get one of the gazillion iPad cases. GhettoCAD is free, so get with Greg Walker. He likes mountain biking, too, so you guys will be best buds.

For mapping on a Mac: There's a third alternative to either running Windows on a Mac, or buying a separate Windows machine. Download Inkscape for Mac (freeware vector graphic design software... I've been using it for years), and then download the free O-Scape plugin. This should work for a Mac. Not only will this work on a Mac, but it's also free, which OCAD is not.

I haven't yet played with O-Scape, but I probably will this summer when I start experimenting with some new maps. One thing I don't know about O-Scape is if it plays well with OCAD. If I save a file in O-Scape, can I send it to someone with OCAD?

Purple Pen & Catching Features: Won't work on a Mac. Both shouldn't take up too much computing power, so getting a entry-level or used PC should suffice for this.

Move your video footage off your Mac and install parallels to run Windows. Add more ram if you need to. Works pretty well.

Interesting thread. I have used OCAD-6 on Linux with the help of Wine and wine-tricks. Would this technique work on a Mac?

I run OCAD under Parallels and it works surprisingly well on a macbook pro.

I tried ocad through parallels on an iMac, but it's not the same. Too used to what I've used for too long. Hoping GC will work.

How well do tablet interfaces work for drafting in OCAD? I remain skeptical that they have enough fine control, but I am hoping to have my mind changed!

I store some video footage on an external drive as it is, but when I'm working on a video project- which is nearly all the time- I need to have SOME footage on my Mac. I'd rather leave my Mac designated as a video editing computer.

I'm leaning towards buying a small $500 laptop for mapping purposes only.

Now, which one? :)

But then I try to spend as little time drafting in OCAD as possible, just using it to bring together multiple layers of stuff coming from other sources. So my usage may not be typical.

So far, I'm very happy with my Lenovo E220s, which I got for around $650.

Key when buying a windows 7 laptop. Getting the latest processor is not such a big deal, but don't skimp on the ram (4GB minimum). When I open big OCAD files, I still notice a screen refresh lag. This might be a graphics card thing, or it might just be an OCAD thing. If you get serious about mapping in the NW, you'll probably want to process some lidar datasets eventually, so you'll might appreciate having the 64-bit OS (although, on second thought, that probably doesn't matter for a 4GB laptop). (Note, I'm not really an expert on the computer front)

*I can't recall if I have screen refresh issues on OCAD with my desktop beast, and I can't check until it finishes a heavy data-processing job.

Hey Socks - thanks for the Inkscape tip. I was thinking of downloading it recently anyway, but that is a pretty slick program! I think OCAD just got bumped as my preferred graphics design tool.

Coming from ~20 years of OCAD use, there seem to be many extra wrist/finger actions needed to accomplish similar things in Inkscape to what I do in OCAD, but that's for map editing—getting the points and curve points to be exactly where you want them to be. For general graphics design, perhaps Inkscape wins out on capabilities.

Has anyone had any real success using OCAD on a tablet? The one time I tried it I ran into problems drawing curves because OCAD is designed to respond to a click and then drag which and I wasn't able to recreate the click and drag on the touch screen.

How well do tablet interfaces work for drafting in OCAD? I remain skeptical that they have enough fine control, but I am hoping to have my mind changed!

Quoting http://o-wiki.net/index.php?title=Mapping_with_GPS since it seems relevant:

"Most phones/tablets has regular capacitive screen these days, nice for web browsing but not that at all for precise map drawing, any regular resistive screen would do better." Jarkko Ryyppö [1]

http://www.kartringen.se/kartringen2011-01.pdf
newsletter (from last year) from Swedish mappers organisation testing two tablets for outdoor use with OCAD 10.

you can cut and paste text into an online translator to gewt the general idea - I can help translate more accurately if you need

I've been using an iPad + Ghettocad for a bit over a year now, and I like it a lot. Much preferable to mylar and pencils, and to the netbook + OCAD I tried in the field for about a year.

I find no difficulties with the capacitive screen. I find a stylus helps, but isn't absolutely necessary (Griffin stylus, about $10, is my favorite). Greg has GC set up so that when you draw, a magnifying glass pops up allowing you to do detailed and accurate drafting in spite of the limitations of the screen. After some experience with GC, I now do almost all drafting using GC, with very little need to do any touch up work with OCAD.

What is the accuracy of the GPS built in in the iPad?
Is it comparable with Garmin GPS devices?
Is there also a monitoring of the expected accuracy?

So.. how much can GhettoCad do? Can one map to high quality an area start to finish, entirely on GhettoCad?

Is it an abbreviated version of OCAD or is it a different (competing) program entirely? Are files are not cross-compatible?

I've never used either, so excuse my ignorance of how they work.

Thanks!

Two years old now... but here's something on GhettoCAD:
http://okansas.blogspot.com/2010/08/downtown-sprin...

In terms of whether one can do a high quality map start to finish with GC, my experience is yes. Over the past year I've done almost all drafting on GC. E.g., for a recent sprint map I used OCAD only to fill in some area features such as paved areas. Otherwise all drafting was done in GC. Last fall for a traditional map in a forested area, I think I used OCAD only for the final layout such as a border and legend, and course setting.

Files transfer seamlessly between GC and OCAD, so that's no problem.

GC is not a commercial program--Greg is providing GC at no cost--so we can't bug him about technical support and the like. But if those using GC and others interested in using it want, it would be easy enough to set up a users group to discuss issues, tips, support, etc.

For amee's question about the iPad's GPS accuracy: I find it ok, but not as good as other GPS devices. It's somewhat of a side issue to this thread, but I'd be curious to know if others have had the same experience. As far as I can tell the iPad uses a roughly equivalent GPS chipset, so there should not be much of a difference. But my iPad seems consistently rougher than my other GPS devices in terms of GPS accuracy.

The GPS on my iPhone 4 seems really accurate. It knows which parking spot I'm in when I'm sitting in the car, for example. Would the iPhone & iPad GPS chips be much different?

Speaking of Apple products and maps, is anyone looking forward to whatever Apple has in store with its own maps, likely to be announced next week?

From personal experience, using the Runkeeper App on the iPhone4, the GPS is unreliable at best. More often than not, whilst out walking around the suburbs, the GPS will throw in one or more unaccountable data points, as far away as 5km. It seems to do so most often just after the start, so I'll walk about 200m checking the GPS trace and if I notice the error, I'll reset it. 2711 and I have noticed it on other Apps as well, so we believe it's not just the Runkeeper App.

At admitted risk of stirring up some controversy, I think that if you can wait 4 - 6 months, you should wait for the slew of tablets to be released running Windows 8. And OCAD is already known to run on it.

greg_l, I like that idea a LOT!

Except the waiting part. haha.

There are several options for mapping with Windows Mobile/PocketPC/Smartphones too:

http://www.momap.se/

http://www.systemasmund.com/

Regardless of what you're using, a bluetooth GPS worn on your head is definitely recommended.

I have two points of comment.
I saw a brief demonstration of the Asmund System when I was at the O'Ringen Academy a few years ago. Very impressive. What I like best about it over a program running on a laptop or tablet is the durability of the hardware. It is a very compact unit, fitting in the palm of one's hand. I can't imagine walking through our forests, stunbling over rocks and logs carrying an open laptop, same with a tablet.
Also I've had indifferent results recording detail with my Garmin 405. I think one of the problems may be that it only records a point every four seconds, another would be the shielding effect of my body, trees, etc. It is most useful in measuring distance the way a map records it - -in two dimensions. But agree with Eriol - bluetooth your head!!!

Yow! 2000 Eur is pricey for a dedicated mapping unit. Might be OK if you're a professional mapper.

Can you change the recording intervals on the Garmins?

Gordon, I can walk at 1.5m/s if I really try but mapping is always less than 1m/s. So 4 seconds is under 4m which is within the variability of the consumer-level GPS's that most of us use. I think Jagge has done some repeatability experiments with different devices, but I don't expect better than 10m.

I was probably expecting too much of my Garmin 405. Mapping in SW Florida I was trying to trace the boundaries of palmetto thickets and clearings from 10 to about 50 M across. I could get the location right but not the accurate boundaries. That still took pacing and bearings. It didn't seem to improve accuracy by walking more slowly.

Yes, sticker shock knocked me out of the Asmund market, too. You can buy a lot of mylar and pencils for 2000 EUR.
But one point I think they make is that you are paying for a durable unit with a much longer 'lifetime' than the alternatives.

With GC and gmap background, you could zoom in and draw the outline of the palmetto with no problem. And once you have the overall location set, you could do much of it from the shade of your porch. Then go out in the field to confirm it.

Reviving this one almost 2 years later....

I just bought a Dell Venue 8 Pro for $230. Plus an active stylus for another $30.

It's an 8" tablet that runs the full Windows 8.1, and it has a digitizer, meaning that you can get more precision when using a stylus (the stylus has two buttons that work kinda like mouse buttons).

I installed OOM and OCAD6 last night on it (I didn't have a handy copy of a more modern OCAD available). Obviously, the input devices are different than a desktop. In Windows 8.1, I can use a tiny on-screen keyboard that seems to work with shift/control + touch actions. Touching with fingers works in OCAD6 and OOM, but the stylus only works in OCAD. In OOM, I can't seem to select or draw anything with the stylus, which is unfortunate, as I was hoping that I could turn this little thing into a pretty sweet OOM tablet.

So, my questions are:

-- In the last two years, what are the preferred tablets for mapping? I chose the Dell because it was cheap, has the digitizer, and can run OCAD and OOM. For Apple devices, I think GhettoCAD is still the only choice? And what about Android-based systems?

-- Is there something I'm missing with an active stylus not working with OOM? Or could this be something that the OOM developers could easily fix? I'm not much of a hardware/software guy, but I was able to get the active stylus to work in OCAD6, MSPaint, etc.

-- I don't know much about how touch screens work, so could I get a "passive" stylus that works like touching the screen with my fingers, but with more precision, as a workaround with OOM?

Can you see the screen in the woods? I would start from there. I don't think any device has a screen bright enough for mapping in California outside of rain season, and when it's rain season, the devices aren't waterproof (unless you pay $$$$$ for some kind of IP67 military-grade hardware).

Can that dell thing charge from the usb? 8 hours of battery is probably 4 hours of intensive use.

it does look like a nice thing.

Several hobby mappers I know bough some half year ago samsung smart pc devices (win 8 pro). It comes with wacom digitizer stylus, nice device but has a bit too big screen. Device's waterproofness is not much of an issue, one can put it in a plastic bag - these are fanless devices and does not need much cooling at all. But pen will get wet and it's a difficult to make that waterproof.

Pretty much all of them use bt gps on their hat (best possible view to the sky) and Ocad8 standard (it has gps hair function and Ocad 9 standard doesn't have it, you need pro version for that - or that's I have been told). They do mostly forest mapping, for sprint mapping gps is quite useless. Screen brightness is quite ok they say, but the sun never shines here. I can imagine that dell may have made the screen brighter because it's a lot smaller. so less power is needed to light it up.

Mapping isn't intensive use for these devices, so most likely 8 hours is what you will get, probably even more.

Here is photo of an one year older Dell model in O mapping use.
https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=6510900749...

Can that Dell thing charge from the usb? 8 hours of battery is probably 4 hours of intensive use.

It charges through a mini USB port. I don't know about battery life yet, but I can probably prolong it a bit by turning off wi-fi and bluetooth.

I don't think I'll be using a GPS with mine (at least at first). The mapping projects I've got on my plate are either urban or pretty wide open, and have really good satellite images.

The main question I had was with OOM and active stylus support. It looks like I'm the first one with such an issue, so I created a ticket for it. A passive stylus should work, but then I lose the buttons and the ability to use it through a drybag.

I also haven't tried OCAD9. My club has licenses on CD to use for mapping, so I'd need to figure out how to get that onto the tablet. Ideally, I'd prefer OOM, because that's what I started using last year, and I really liked it. It may work out with a passive stylus and maybe the developer can add active stylus support in a future release (I have no idea how difficult that is).

Jagge, thanks for the photo! I'm assuming that's OCAD on there? Do you know if that user has a more elegant solution for shift+click or control+click than using a mini on-screen keyboard?

I believe they do all the ctrl and shift clicking work later at home. If mosquitoes and deerflies are eating you alive - or alternatively your fingers are freezing - you happily just draw edges and set classifications right and do all the tidying and cosmetics later, with big screen, mouse and cup of hot coffee.

I tried OOM with samsung's wacom pen. Same here, there is mouse over effects but you can't click anything.

You can draw edges and set classifications on a piece of mylar and then OCR/vectorize it in the time it takes to pour a cup of coffee. The utility seems to be to take some of the drafting into the woods when the memory is fresh, compressing the number of hours. If you have to second- or third-pass everything, I don't see how hauling a device into mosquitoland is a win.

I tried OOM with samsung's wacom pen. Same here, there is mouse over effects but you can't click anything.

Thanks for verifying this. Looks like it's definitely on the OOM end, and not Dell's or Microsoft's.

There is no GPS hair on mylar and that's the major advantage here. Plenty of evergreen forest here, aerials are useless to spot boulders and such. And it usually not parkland, so there is forestry going on all he time. Aerials are often couple of years old at least, so none of the latest changes are there. With mylar you and up doing lost of pace-counting and other measuring, it's less fun and time consuming and the quality you get with GPS is superior compared to pace-counting. Also, daylight is limiting natural resource here (and for hobby mappers possibility to find time to go to the forest). So, if you have only some hours of mapping time every now and then you will get much more done if you don't use the valuable time for something you can easily do without actually being in forest. It's much more easy to find time to do that to do that work, it can be just thirty minutes every now and then when, like when it's dark and kids are sleeping. You will have to make sure minimum distances between same colors are right, form line gaps are placed right, minimum length of cliff, decide cliff by cliff will you use tags and if you do how to place them (you can't do this untill all the stuff is there and you can see how much room you have). If you do all that in forest you are for sure not using your time the optimal way. So there will be second drafting pass anyway.

Your circumstances may be different, open terrain so aerials are fine (be careful with aerials in steep terrains, ortho-rectifying with poor DEM are not that accurate even if resolution is good), parkland with no much changes, plenty of daylight.

For three of those mappers who got that samsung that was their second mapping tablet. Older ones one were heavy and with fans. None of mappers I know here have considered going back to mylars, no way.

So no, the utility is not to be to take some of the drafting into the woods, at least not here what it comes to forest mapping. But I can see that it could be for urban ISSOM mapping.

Here one Swiss mapper who seems to do mapping sort of like with mylar but with tablet and gps and he does all the drafting later. Look's like he even uses separate symbols set with no fills for field checking:
http://www.swiss-orienteering.ch/files/kommission_...

As far a hand held gps computers for in the field trimble has top of the line devices. The geo7 is a great hand held with built in laser for documenting those thing that are just out of reach. But the better device is the Yuma 2. It is just awesome and is like having a computer in your hands capable of running windows programs. Also when you are getting reliable coordinates up to less than 4 meters and with the capability of using a myfi to use cellular data for more precise locations. Here is the link for trimbles handhelds. Very impressive devices.

https://www.trimble.com/mappingGIS/Handheld-Comput...

If all you are doing is boundaries and classification, then seeing the GPS hair in the woods helps but does it help that much? Just walk the boundaries, record the GPS, and process it while sipping coffee. => Even less time to spend in the woods.

Re aerials in steep terrain, indeed so, ideally the photos and the lidar were taken during the same flight and then the lidar-derived elevations were used to orthorectify these same photos. I only undertook mapping this year and the next because this combo was available for the chosen terrain, otherwise I'd have gone nuts trying to figure things out.

By the way Jarkko, Pullautin is almost exactly (n + 1) for Bay Area terrain (i.e. it thinks that light green is medium green, etc.) I should send you a set of observations, the most important ones being (a) if it thinks there is a clearing, there with 90% certainty is indeed one that you would want to map and that is over the minimum ISOM size, just not necessarily of the shape Pullautin thinks it is; and (b) if there is a cliff, with 95% certainty Pullautin will pick it up, and usually the shape is right, but the reverse is not true. Which is kinda how you want it.

Of course we map all we put to our maps. GPS sure helps. We simply map stuff - you draw one corner of a green when you are mapping there, an other corner (and line in between) later when you are mapping that spot. When you have visited all of the edges it will be done, unless you decide to change it a bit here and there when walking trough. You don't want to use time for walking around boundaries, one by one, separately (and all over again if you want to change it). And with the accuracy we are getting with current gps device (+-5m) you better not record stuff like that one by one, and later import and place as they are, separately, because stuff easily end up wrong side of the boundary. Instead you usually stand somewhere and locate one point with gps and make sure stuff like boulders and cliffs and land form etc you map there gets placed right related to that positioned point. Then ~50m away you locate same way, and the stuff halfway between you place the way is correct compared to both of those. So even if there is +-5 gps error it never becomes a problem. For example if you have tight group of boulders, dotknolls and cliffs and you pick them with gps separately, objects easily end up all wrong - gps error can be different and bigger than the distance between objects.

It would be much harder to handle this error correctly if you start walking around linear features and try guesstimating correct locations and gps errors afterwards at home when importing tracks and recorded points. But I must admit it would be fun to try walking new ditches and edges of impassable marshes and other nasty stuff.

T/D, probably easiest and best way to get something useful green out of pullautin is letting it draw ~30 shades of green. Then you later just pick the shade for certain green level or check spots where it gets several shades darker (likely green boundary there), you can also get only 3 shades with simply editing palette (lightest green to white, next greens to light green and so on).

I can guess you get there plenty of cliffs the does not exists really with default settings, your terrains are so steep. Here it's not problem, because even if there is not an actual cliffs there is usually a steep place one can identify. It's fine by me if I get all cliffs and little "Bay Areas" mapped with same symbol here in Finland. But it may not be that great feature for you. Difficult to say what you would get with higher cliff height value, like 1.5m. Possibly still false alerts but also loosing some actual cliffs.

Any new updates to this thread? I've been doing mapping mostly the old-fashioned way, but not very much lately. I am planning to change things up and will likely be doing a lot more mapping. I currently have an ipad through work that I will need to relinquish and am wondering whether to purchase a replacement ipad or something else. I am generally Apple based with a desktop Mac and an iphone. I run OCAD 11 on Windows 7 in bootcamp.

What would folks recommend at this point?

Have you tried Ghettocad?

I have a Microsoft Surface 3 Pro (12 inch screen), 128 GB. I am a long-time Mac user, but this is a nice piece of equipment (coming from Microsoft !) - but pricey: ~ $ 1000. It is a full-fledged laptop, has a writing tablet screen - comes with digital pen -, runs on a fast MS Windows 8.1 - has a very bright screen - has a good battery - comparable in size and weight to the IPad. Mine has now 5 months of heavy use and I see no deterioration. I have revised a current small map with OOM. I find drawing of trails, contours, etc using the digital pen to be superior compared to using a mouse. The tablet and pen functions seem to work fine. Finally I can do all my work (on-line teaching, stats number crunching, mapping and course setting) on this one tablet. So for me it is worth the $ 1k. I have not tested its ruggedness - mostly just indoor use.

I've heard of Ghettocad, but not used it. I'm trying to download it this week, so I can try it out before I have to give up my current ipad.

Ernst - just looked at the Microsoft Surface. It looks really cool. I like the idea of something that can serve as both laptop and tablet. Right now I travel with just the ipad and not any other laptop. Sometimes that can be frustrating. Have you just used OOM or have you tried using OCAD? I seem to understand that OOM has built in some functions to support Mobile devices, but I'm not sure if OCAD has.

You can use OOM on an Andriod device.

http://oorienteering.sourceforge.net/?p=186

I've used OOM on a Kindle Fire HD. It works well. I use it with the "scribble" template and then draft at home on a laptop.

A generic problem with a tablet for field work is that it is probably heavier than a map board with mylar. The Kindle I use weighs 342 grams while my usual map boad weighs 246 grams.

The other problem with a tablet is glare off the screen. I added a cheap screen protector that is supposed to cut glare. It helps, but it still isn't perfect.

You can use OOM on Android, Windows (including Surface Pro but not the lower end Surface I think) and Mac. You can't use it on iOS, and likely never will be able to, because the issue is licensing. Ghettocad is not really an ongoing option as I understand... it's only available through a beta program, and not maintained. So, an iPad is one of the few tablets that you can't so easily do O mapping with (sadly)., though you could probably use a drawing program to simply capture field notes, and draft them into OOM or OCAD at home.

I got a Dell Venue 8 Pro about a year ago for $200, plus an active stylus. It runs Windows 8.1, therefore OOM desktop. At the time, desktop OOM didn't really work for touch screens, but in the past year, they've added some features to be able to make work a lot better in the field.

The mapper who stayed with me last year switched from mylar to using a computer in the field. I think the tablet thing he got may be made by Trimble, and is a weatherproof unit with a screen designed for viewability in sunlight and has built-in GPS and an extended battery -- very specialized for fieldwork (and expensive). He's using 0CAD in the field, and the interesting thing is that he had some difficulty using the stylus for certain subtle operations (I don't remember the details). I handed him a wireless mouse, which he was really skeptical about, but he plugged it in and gave it a try. He came back from one day in the woods and went out to buy his own wireless mouse. He uses the mouse on his thigh, and said it worked much better then the stylus.. I haven't talked to him since early last fall, so I don't know if this has changed.

I have OOM on a Surface Pro 3. (You should be able to use it on the new Surface 3, which is Windows 8.1 but not earlier Surfaces which are Windows RTM).

I've used it for a local park. It think it would be a great solution for touching up a campus map, something like that, but the SP3 is still a little to heavy, fragile, and expensive to lug into the field for forest mapping... my impression is that using the pen actively is a pretty high battery drain too, so your field session would be limited to a three or four hours.

Scribble mode in the field, like spike said. I thought the stylus would be really useful for drafting at home, but so far I've found that it saves very little time over the mouse, and the mouse still feels most precise to me. Stylus is great for just drawing... but the problem is that I'm a little bit OCD when it comes to tweaking my beizer curves.