Manifold Viewer
http://manifold.net/images/Eye_of_the_Sahara.pngEye of the Sahara, synthetic terrain elevation with parallel-computed enhancement
http://manifold.net/images/st_helens_crater.pngSt Helens volcano crater, synthetic terrain with Google layers for context
http://manifold.net/images/lake_wales_ridge_02.pngLake Wales Ridge in Florida, hill shaded synthetic terrain from Space Shuttle radar data, with contrast adjustment on web-served layers
http://manifold.net/images/import_giras3.pngLand Use in San Francisco Bay region, USGS land use data in GIRAS vector format, thematically colored on the fly, plus web server layers
Why Viewer? Data is getting bigger, with images/raster data in the tens to 100+ GB range now routine from LiDAR data, satellite remote sensing and drones. Non-parallel viewers are too slow at showing such data, let alone analyzing or transforming it. Data is also getting more sophisticated with combinations of vector data and DBMS, raster and vector and web sources, which people want to explore, analyze, and transform in sophisticated ways. Viewer does that, using all CPU and GPU cores for parallel data manipulation, for parallel analytics and for parallel visualization.
Summary: Viewer combines GIS and DBMS capabilities to extract, visualize, transform, blend, analyze, validate, and explore a very wide range of data types, from simple images to complex DBMS constellations of hundreds of tables with thousands of fields. Viewer automatically runs fully parallel - no need to write parallel code - on all CPU cores and all GPU cores. Viewer can display and analyze huge raster images and other raster data, DBMS, and GIS vector data that are hundreds of gigabytes in size on ordinary desktop PCs, with panning and zooming of big images typically in fractions of a second.
Viewer launches quickly from a small installation: including both 64-bit and 32-bit versions the portable installation is only 60 MB in size. The online user manual has 660+ topics, 9100+ illustrations, and hundreds of step-by-step examples. There are 90+ videos showing how to operate it. The user interface is clean and simple.
Viewer is free: There are no ads, no need to register, no tracking or contacting of users of any kind, no selling, and no requests for donations. Viewer is not a trial but a fully-functional, standalone, read-only version of Manifold's new Release 9 parallel GIS. You can do a lot of intensely useful visualization, DBMS control, analytics, data exploration and content creation with Viewer despite it being read-only.
What you can do with Viewer:
1. Open, view, and explore imagery, raster data, vector data, and tabular data from hundreds of different sources including difficult formats like OSM PDF, ESRI geodatabases, or enterprise spatial databases in Oracle Spatial, SQL Server spatial and similar. Viewer can import data into Viewer's internal database engine, the Radian parallel engine, or link data into the project, leaving it stored in the original format or data source.
2. Create killer screenshots as content for web pages, reports and other publications.
3. Import data in the hundreds of GB in size, data so big it may crash or halt non-parallel viewers. After import, pan and zoom within 200 GB images in 1/10 second.
4. Use Viewer as a control panel for databases, including enterprise-class DBMS server installations like Oracle, MySQL, SQL Server, PostgreSQL, DB2 and many others. Manipulate those databases by using Viewer point-and-click tools, or with the database's own SQL, or with Manifold SQL, or a mix of both.
5. Explore data from spatially-aware formats in automatically georeferenced form, using Viewer's built-in knowledge of over 7000 coordinate systems, so different data layers can be combined in multi-layer presentations. Viewer knows all common DBMS SRIDs (coordinate system codes) for spatial databases in enterprise DBMS.
6. Validate data has been correctly georeferenced by comparing it against "known good" layers, and try different fixes, if necessary, by reprojecting data to discover how to repair errors.
7. Analyze and transform raster, vector or tabular data using fully parallel SQL, or by using hundreds of point-and-click transform/analytic tools, or a combination of both. SQL in Viewer is automatically both CPU parallel and GPU parallel, all the time, using all cores in your system. CPU/GPU parallel analytics can often accomplish in seconds what takes minutes or even hours in non-parallel software.
8. Learn SQL. Viewer is built on Manifold's Radian database engine, so it includes a full-featured spatial SQL. Open one of the published projects that includes sample data for popular SQL books and use Viewer to execute sample queries and to write your own. Connect to popular free DBMS systems like MySQL, PostgreSQL/PostGIS, or the Express editions of Oracle, SQL Server, or DB2, or to Access, GPKG, or similar file databases and learn to do SQL and Spatial SQL in a highly visual context.
9. View and explore the world around you by layering dozens of different web served layers. Instead of just looking at Google Earth, combine that with Bing, OSM and a host of specialized servers to pan and zoom around the world, and combine that with data from hundreds of different formats or from your DBMS installations to see data in context within those web served layers. See the downloads page below for example projects that help fight wildfires in California, show interesting/goofy sites on web servers, provide views of nuclear reactors, civil war battle sites, known meteorite finds, volcanoes, French chateux, archaeological sites and monuments in France, and more.
10. Redistribute Viewer - If you are publishing data in the form of images, GIS vector data, or data sets where a free viewing tool and analytics console will help people use your data, you can redistribute Viewer.
Viewer is extremely robust: You can use Viewer for years, launching mind-bending complex tasks against huge data sets, and never expect to see a crash.
Category: Graphics - Viewers, Others - Data Analysis, Others - Database - Tools, Education - Geography, Others - Miscellaneous (Would be nice to have an Others - GIS or Others - Cartography category)
System Requirements: Win7 / Win8 / Win10 / 64-bit or 32-bit
Writes settings to: Application data file
Stealth: Yes
Unicode support: Yes, with full support for collations
License: Freeware. Commercial use OK.
How to extract: Download the ZIP package and extract to a folder of your choice. Launch ~/bin64/manifold.exe for 64 bits or ~/bin/manifold.exe for 32 bits.
Home Page: http://www.manifold.net/viewer.shtml
Downloads Page: http://www.manifold.net/updates/download_viewer.shtml
Viewer is updated frequently: Cutting Edge builds are portable only and are issued every week or two. Official builds are issued every two months in portable and installer installations. Everybody uses Cutting Edge builds.
Portable installations require installation of Microsoft's current Visual C++ redistributable packages on the Windows system. If the redistributables are not already installed, download and install both the 64 bit and 32 bit Visual C++ redistributables from Microsoft's page at https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/hel ... -downloads
Introductory Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cKZ7Q8PttSQ
Gallery: http://www.manifold.net/info/radian_gallery.shtml
Screenshot: http://manifold.net/images/vertical_lidar2.png
User Manual: http://www.manifold.net/doc/mfd9/index.htm#
Longer Description
Viewer tracks Release 9, so as new capabilities get added to 9 they automatically appear in Viewer. For example, in the last three weeks addition of Viewshed and Watershed computations, incorporation of all known, high accuracy EPSG "grid" transformations worldwide, addition of 1000+ more EPSG coordinate systems, automatic consumption of parcel descriptions in traverse (metes and bounds) formats, and enhanced Snap modes for editing all appeared in Viewer the same day they appeared in 9.
Viewer includes all Release 9 features except that is is read-only, it does not print, and it does not include scripting/programming. Viewer retains all other Release 9 features, like full spatial SQL, full CPU and GPU parallelism, all visualization capabilities and all analytic capabilities. It includes over 7000 coordinate systems with all reprojection machinery, including 170 grid transformations. Support for so many coordinate systems means data brought in from spatially aware formats will automatically be georegistered and be ready to use in correct geographic context.
Using Viewer, people can browse data in hundreds of different formats, connect to, import or link, and blend data from enterprise data in major DBMS servers like Oracle, MySQL, SQL Server, PostgreSQL/PostGIS, SQL Server, from numerous proprietary and web sources, including standards like Google, Bing, OpenStreetMap, WMS, WMTS, WFS, TMS, GeoJSON, ArcGIS REST, and ESRI geodatabase. Viewer provides many-layered maps that can reproject on the fly any layer to fit into geospatial context with layers that use other coordinate systems.
Users can do analytics and create visualizations in Viewer, and then take screenshots to use on web sites and in publications. For example, you could compose a layered presentation with layers taken from an Oracle enterprise spatial database, combined with other layers from a Postgres database, with a background layer served by Bing or Google, with a variety of custom layers and overlaid photography from local files, and with demographic layers drawn from data downloaded from the Census Bureau.
Viewer easily displays multi-hundred GB images and other raster data. Use Viewer to connect to specialized, complex formats like ESRI geodatabases or OSM PDF, and to view huge images, shapefiles and other GIS data that are too large, too complex, or too slow to view in non-parallel software. Connect as a client / control panel to Oracle, MySQL, SQL Server, PostgreSQL/PostGIS, IBM DB2 and other databases, and use the DBMS's own native SQL, or use Viewer's spatial SQL, or mix both in the same query. Although Viewer is read-only and won't save projects, you can do very sophisticated SQL and build queries that can be copied and pasted from ordinary text files to save between Viewer sessions.
Viewer also includes the full range of hundreds of Release 9 point-and-click transforms and templates to manipulate data in tables, imagery, vector geometry and databases, as well as full spatial SQL with hundreds of functions. All Viewer functions, including SQL, are fully and automatically CPU parallel and GPU parallel.
Downsides:
1. Must read documentation - Viewer does so much you can't learn it by poking at buttons. You need to read the introductory topics in the user manual and work through some of the examples. If you read a few topics and watch a few videos, you can get your head around the basics very quickly if all you want to do is simple things like viewing different files.
2. Evolves very rapidly - Release 9 is a community-driven product that evolves very rapidly, about 50 new features a week, so that means Viewer evolves very rapidly too. Every two weeks or so there is a new cutting edge build, and the official build gets updated every couple of months. That can make it hard to keep up with changes, both for users and documentation / videos. On the plus side, that means the community gets what it wants and bugs get eradicated very quickly, typically the next build after they are reported.
There's also, I think, a moral imperative not too aim too low. One reason the world is so full of superficial, low quality software is the assumption that it if doesn't fit a ten second attention span, time to move on. But there are *so* many great things in this world that reward a greater investment of attention, from fine carpentry to learning how to fly a small plane, that it's worth taking a look at new things which can really expand your horizons, even if they might involve a bit of effort.
