iGIS

Last week, a friend of mine alerted me that there was a mobile GIS app for the iPhone called iGIS by Geometry never heard of them until last week.  She asked if I was planning on getting it since I have an iPhone and I’m interested in the latest and greatest . We don’t do as much mobile GIS work in my office but I figured what the heck I’ll go check it out and give it a try. I have to warn you that I’m pretty impatient when it comes to app testing if an app fail my 5 minute test, I tend to stay away. That said, I bit my lip (it still hurts) and paid the $19.99 to download and test. After the download, I spent a few minutes creating a new project and set off to importing some shape files that I had sitting on my computer. These shapefiles were >50 MB with the exception of one file that was 65 KB. I pressed the import button, which gave me an IP address to upload the files and watch the progress of the uploads. You basically have to specify the spatial reference if your data had none… That was pretty painless once I figured out that I needed my Wi-Fi turned on for this to work. A wired network won’t work you need Wi-Fi. The instructions actually specify that “A Wi-Fi network is required to import or export data…” after flipping the Wi-Fi switch to on all was well and the data import wizards started doing their thing. This was not a long process and it is as fast as they claim…

Unfortunately for me, only one of the shapefiles imported. I’m assuming that it had to do with the size of the files and number of features. The smallest file imported fine but the rest did not. I also had some problems displaying the attributes for the layer that did import. The screen was blank when I tried to ID a feature on my map. Having big fingers don’t help. I can’t wait for this to be ported to the iPad it makes more sense there but is a little tricky on the iPhone. You can add comments but no way of editing data which seems to me to be a requirement for this type of application. If not straight edits the ability to add and export markups would be helpful.  I give it 3 stars for nice try… but for it to be useful as a mobile app it should not only allow you to view but to edit/mark-up the data on the maps as well. A nice list of current features as well as several videos are on the iGIS website. I think its a great app sans the aforementioned issues above. Also perhaps there should be some warning as to the limits of files that can be imported somewhere in the help.