Ortelius

I paid $400 for a perpetual license, downloaded it, and used it a few times. A couple years later, I wanted to use it again. I opened the software, it demanded my activation number, I provided the activation number I received with my purchase, and got an "unexpected error" message telling me to contact customer support. There is no longer any customer support. A huge waste of money. Do not spend a cent on this.

Ortelius is a case study in making something that appears to require extreme skill – 'vector-based cartography' – accessible to the novice user.  My background in vector-based drawing is as limited as my background in cartography (hint: my Bézier curve game is WEAK). So the fact that I was able to go from app installation to genuine, confident mapmaking in under a minute is a testament to so many things the dev has done right.  The app is familiar; upon launch, you choose from a series of map templates in an interface that echoes iWork’s template gallery. The toolset is comfortably reduced to the bare essentials, lending the sense that everything you need is within easy reach. The templates are varied and wide-ranging, and they hint at the limitless possibilities the app offers. Choosing to go template-less brings to light the raw power and materials the app is built upon: it’s endlessly customizable, but not impossible for the novice to approach. The only identifiable drawbacks to the application lie in what it is not. Ortelius is not an out-and-out GIS, so users expecting such should be aware of this. However, the team at Mapdiva make no claims that it is; in fact, they are more than willing to identify and explain Ortelius’ abilities and limitations. This is particularly noteworthy considering some comments from years past claiming that the dev is unresponsive to messages and feedback. An active user forum featuring helpful dev responses, as well as an incredibly thorough set of documentation, suggest that Ortelius wouldn’t be a wasted investment. The demo is appreciated: anything you create comes with a heavy watermark, but none of the app’s features are significantly curbed. It installs and launches with MacUpdate Desktop like a charm, and at its price point, it’s difficult to imagine anything topping Ortelius feature-for-feature. But maybe that’s just because I don’t know – we’d love to hear from our more carto-vector-graphically inclined users! How does it stack up with any other utilities you’ve used? How could this app help solve a problem for you?

Useless. Lots of bugs. No replies from the developers. Could have been nice, but is just a waste of money. Christian

Many good features, but unstable. No response form developers :-(

ANd I forgot, to complete my preview review, to not expect to import huge SHP files project, to import a 400 MB shp file took it almost 2 H and the result was a bit hazardous .... It became even slower and more unstable.

It puts itself a real mess in the connection nodes while drawing and you will have sometimes to adjust all of them back. It is lacking of stability, can crash also for nothing. Interface a bit clunky sometimes, especially the styles and symbols library. It is missing OSM compatibility. Zoom behavior not efficient when you select a zooming zone, it will zoon inside but a bit away to zone you selected ... Some of the bugs reviewed by Martin not corrected and suffers of numerous bugs making its using not easy sometimes. I doubt the developers are trying it much before releasing or they would correct all of that already because those bugs are so boring you just can't miss them. Or it is to make money faster before the quality. Anyway, nice to play with for a while, but not a real software to work with before all the bugs especially the nodes bugs, the most boring of all, are not corrected.

This software could be interesting. But actually there are so much bugs that is not very usable. Welcome to buy a software still in beta ... Undo is not working correctly, sometimes you mistaken move an object, you undo and will undo something else but not your move, sometimes undo still even not work at all .... The more you draw objects, the more it becomes buggy and unpredictable. And the sometimes you undo something, the redo function will not even work, so you will loose all your work if you just forgot to save before ! The lines connected together can suddenly becomes connected to other points than the one you made the connection to. The import of shapefiles is not good, they are not imported sometimes at the right scale. For example you export several layers from a project in shapefiles, once imported back to Ortlius they are not imported at the same scale all together ... The image browser will not connect to an iPhoto database like any other softwares that use the media browser, but instead it will give access to all the contents of the database files. The symbol styles library is buggy, if you create several styles, you want to add all of them in the "My styles and symbols" section, you can only add one, the others will be added in the general library. You then can't move them anymore, rename or erase them. You can't create your own styles library, only for symbols. You can't manage your styles my erasing them or renaming them. The focus information palette is too much near from the pointing mouse when you are drawing and it can be very troublesome to draw and force to zoom a lot. It is boring sometimes and cannot be completely deactivated. You can't duplicate a layer or give it some transparency level for the whole objects on this layer. It is missing constraints on objects other than over points. All those bugs could acceptable if it was introduced as being in beta, but for being paid it is actually not usable in production. Otherwise the software has a nice GUI, and it can be promising. Waiting for an update that will correct all of this and being able to give it a tray again with a nice review. Actually for this price I would rather use Intaglio which is not a SIG/mapping software but will work quite better than Ortelius to draw and will offer more features, despite I prefer Ortelius interface than the Intaglio messy and clunky one.

Can become very very unstable with large files. Usually use to crash when you are saving your changes ...

-- Price is $99, not $79. Maybe they changed it. $49 academic.

This one is very welcome, since the death of Freehand. I hope it will take its promises. Going to download it and give it a test.