GTViewer for Windows version 15 is ready for Beta Testers. If you would like to try the new GTViewer, please contact support.
It has been a while since a major version of
GTViewer for Windows has been released. This delay has mostly been because the demand from customers has been focused on updates and enhancements to GTViewer for iOS and Android. Nevertheless, there have been 53 incremental versions of GTViewer since version 14 was released.
GTViewer Version 15 has several fixes and many enhancements. The major ones are listed below.
- Session Manager – If you have several sessions open at one time, you now get a Session Manager dialog when you exit. It will show you all sessions that are currently open, their status (saved/not saved), and lets you flip between them so you can identify which one is which. You can dismiss sessions by saving them or not, or you can dismiss them all with one button press. You can also get to the Session Manager from File/Session Manager.
- Display Control Dialog – This new feature is a replacement for the Display Filter dialog used to control which features are displayed in the active view. The original Display Filter dialog is not going away, but you will now have an alternative. The new Display Control dialog no longer does anything with Filter Ids. Its primary tab uses the Feature/Component model used by many of the Add-On applications to turn features on and off. A Category tab is provided to toggle Categories on an off so you can easily just work with Categories (which many users do). The Preset tab from the Display Filter has been moved over, and a new tab for Display Toggles has been added so that you can use Toolbar style Display Toggles as a standard part of the display controls. Display Toggles turn on/off a select set of features whereas a Preset sets the whole set of features to a preconfigured display setting. The new Display Control dialog is also non-modal, so you can do stuff in the view and leave it up (something the Display Filter cannot do).
- Line Style Rendering - In the past there were some problems with dashed lines and User-Defined Linestyles when you had certain types of Arcs. This has all been resolved (finally after15 major versions!). The overall appearance of dashed lines has been improved as well.
- Query Indexes – If you have a Locate Query that takes a long time to run, you can now add
Indexes that should significantly improve performance.
- Locate Query Highlight Modes – For a Locate Query, you can now choose between Persistent Highlight, Non-Persistent Highlight (new), Persistent Box (new), and Non-Persistent Box (new).
- Reload Command – This feature is found under File/Reload and will be useful to those who setup or configure the data. It will save redlines (if any), close the session, then reopen it and reload any changes you made to the configuration files.
- GPS Tracking – GPS tracking will now work more efficiently when you have multiple datasets open and you want to track in all of them.
- API Enhancements - New functionality from GTViewer has been exposed to the External Applications so they can now do things like Preset Building and Finding Features by Key or Type. A Find Feature app has been added using this. The QueryBuilder and ToolTipBuilder both have a new Find Feature command so you don’t have to start from a selected feature anymore.
The GTViewer Add-On Applications have also been updated and new ones have been added as well.
Query Builder
The Query Builder is used to interactively create a Query Definition file inside GTViewer. The biggest new feature in this update is that you can do a Feature Search (by Filter Id, Feature, or Feature/Component) and it will locate a feature to start the Query Builder. Before you had to select a feature of the type you wanted to create a query for to start the process (which was sometimes hard to do). There are a few more features added to the Query Builder to support new functionality in the Queries, like new Highlight Modes, and updates to the Feature Selection dialog was also updated (to match the one in the Dynamic Graphics interface).
Tooltip Builder
The Tooltip Builder is used to create Feature Tooltip definitions to display specified information when you hover the mouse over a feature. It has been updated with the same Feature Search functionality that the new Query Builder has, so you can now either select a feature in the graphics to start it or do a feature query. Feature Selection dialog was also updated (to match the one in the Dynamic Graphics interface).
Preset Builder
The Preset Builder is a new Add-On. It will let you interactively create the Preset Definition Files for use with GTPreset. You can now set the view like you want with the Display Control or Display Filter and extract the current settings as a Preset Definition. This ability makes it significantly easier to create the Preset Definition files (which you had to do manually in the past), and you never have to use Filter Ids again.
Find Feature
This Add-On is like the Feature Search command that was added to the Query Builder and Tooltip Builder, except that it is a stand-alone app and has a few more features. It is targeted for the administrator users who configure the dataset and is very useful when setting up freshly exported data. It can also find any feature in the data by its keys.
Dynamic Graphics Interface
The Dynamic Graphics Interface allows you to configure the Dynamic Graphics (Highlights and Label) interactively. This update has been completely rewritten and provides a much cleaner and informative interface.
If you have a Bing Maps or Google Maps
subscription where you can download static map images for use in Applications, this Add-On will fetch the background imagery and attached to the current view.
Search Redlines, Show Google Maps, and GTSpot Importer are still available.
The Where Am I app has been retired since its functionality was incorporated into GTViewer.
