Free Geography Tools

GIS applications for Window Mobile systems are readily available (e.g. ArcPad from ESRI, TerraSync from Trimble, Mobile GIS from Tensing), but tend to be expensive. I’ve stumbled across a free GIS viewer program for Windows Mobile systems; its successor, a GIS viewer and editor with GPS capabilities, isn’t free but is pretty damn cheap. I don’t currently have access to a Window Mobile system to try these out on, so what I’m writing is based on the limited documentation available for the programs.

The free version of GeoPad (1.1) is a Windows Mobile program capable of displaying vector shapefile data and georeferenced raster imagery (JPG format with a .jgw worldfile) in multiple layers. You can also measure distances, query by feature selection, query by shapefile attributes, and zoom/pan/center etc.. The zip file contains basic documentation, but also seems to contain the C++ source code for the application, so in principle you could crate a version customized to your specific needs.

GeoPad 2.1 is the more functional successor to GeoPad 1.1, including not just the viewer capabilities but also a shapefile layer editor and GPS interface. The following screenshot images are taken from the PDF helpfile available at the website.

Shapefile attribute and feature query:

Layer display (vector and raster); labeling by attribute:

Vector layer creation and editing:

GPS functions (including adding current position to shapefile layer as vertex):

And the GIS editor version of GeoPad is cheap, less than $10 ($9.99 for a single-user license, and $499 for a 100-user license). There’s a software developer kit (SDK) available for application customization for only $49.95. A trial version is available for download, but the website doesn’t indicate what its limitations are.

FWIW, there’s also a free GIS program called GeoMapper downloadable from the site. Installation was problematical for me (just keep hitting “Ignore” for any install errors, and enter anything you want for a serial number and password), the program wasn’t particularly intuitive to use, and kept crashing on me. On the plus side, the Visual Basic 6 source code is included, so you could always take a crack at making your own custom GIS from it if you want (not me, thanks).