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Release of V5.00 TNT products
March 1995

Table of Contents

I. Introduction

• Prologue
• Status of Client Base?
• Improved Reliability
• New Features
• Plans for V5.10

II. Windows NT 3.5

III. Windows 95

IV. MI/X (MicroImages' X Server)

• for Apple Mac

V. Upgrading from DOS MIPS

VI. TNTmips^TM 5.0

VII. TNTsdk^TM 5.0 for TNTmips 5.0

VIII. TNTview^TM 5.0

IX. TNTatlas^TM of San Francisco

X. TNTdemo^TM 5.0

XI. On-Line Documentation

XII. Apple Macintosh via System 7.x.

• X-Server
• Performance
• Comments on Performance
• Comparison between Macs
• Prices
• Peripherals
• Free Upgrade
• Authorization Key
• Installation
• TNTdemo
• TNTatlas

XIII. New Price List

XIV. New TNTmips Features

• System Level
• Project File Maintenance
• User Interface
• Icons
• Toolbars
• ToolTips
• TNT Advisory Window
• Drop-down dialog boxes
• *Raster Pyramiding
• 2D viewing
• *Stereo Viewing
• Edit Raster
• TIN Formation
• *TIN: Important Point Extraction
• *TIN: Profile Analysis
• SML
• Import/Export of Rasters
• Surface Fitting
• *Raster Morphology
• Filtering Rasters
• Feature Mapping
• Classification
• *DEM/ortho
• Fill Pattern Editor
• Style Editor
• Import/Export of Vectors
• Map and Poster Layout
• *Object Editing
• Vector Merge
• *Vector Filtering
• Buffer Zones
• Thai Localization
• Japanese and Chinese Localization
• TrueType

XIV. New Image Printers/Plotters Supported

• Canon BJC-4000
• Xerox 4700 II Printer

XV. New Scanners Supported

XVI. International Travel

XVII. Exclusive International Representatives

XVIII. NAFTA Resellers and VARs

XIX. Staff Additions

XX. Promo Materials

XXI. AUW7

XXII. Digital Chart of the World

XXIII. Computers

XXIV. Digital Raster Graphics

XXV. Testimonials

XXVI. Technical References

Color Plates

Stereo to DEM Improvement

Release of V5.00 TNT products

Introduction

Prologue.

The MicroImages MEMOs, which have accompanied each of the 35 software releases and interim MEMOs, have gradually evolved into an informal newsletter and also somewhat of an editorial forum. New clients periodically ask "who writes these MicroImages MEMOs"? Eventually most clients learn that all the MEMOs are written by me, Lee D. Miller, one of the leaders of the MicroImages team. This sometimes onerous and sometimes pleasant task stops upon my desk.

I continue to write this growing periodic communication with you as it provides me an opportunity once or twice a quarter to make sure that I, the MicroImages team members, and our clients actually understand what is happening within MicroImages, where product developments stand, and where we are all going. I spend a lot of my time each day on the bureaucratic issues of managing a small, high-tech company and the general technical details of the product development. Thus, I do not necessarily know how everything fits together until this MEMO is complete.

In many ways I find my job to be somewhat similar to that of publisher of a newspaper (quarterly instead of daily or weekly and on CD-ROMs as well as paper). This is not something you can do in the last week of the quarter. Everyone at MicroImages must know and do their daily jobs to make sure it all comes together at the date of publication.

Needless to say, everyone at MicroImages contributes to the content of these MicroImages MEMOs. They provide the software features, illustrations, lists of new features, speed tests, printing, packing, billing, shipping, and so on. In fact, every staff member reads and edits every one of these MEMOs for technical correctness before it is finished and reproduced.

Slick publication and detailed editing is deliberately avoided in the MicroImages MEMOs. Such an orientation toward a magazine format and away from the newspaper format reduces the content to a lower-common-denominator, significantly delays the release of needed information while the "glossy" features are added. This costs more, reducing the frequency, timeliness, content, and page count due to the increased expense.

Status of Client Base.

MicroImages is pleased to distribute V5.00 of the TNT products and the 35th consecutive quarterly release of the Map and Image Processing System. The passage from V4.90 to V5.00 as usual represents three months of additional work. However, this was the first quarter in more than 3 years in which less than half of the software effort was invested in the recreation and perfection of the MicroImages products across a much broader base (multi-user, multi-platform, and multi-focus with windows). As a result, V5.00 has extra significance in that it represents a more business-as-usual quarter at MicroImages wherein a majority of the software development effort was invested in adding new and innovative features to your TNT products.

So what is the result of MicroImages' past three years of conversion grief as measured in the marketplace? It is MicroImages' pleasure to report the following results from V4.90 over the past quarter.

Oldest. The earliest and first DOS based system ever shipped by MicroImages (MIPS V0.90   sold and shipped in 1986) was reactivated by its original purchaser from DOS MIPS   V3.33 and upgraded through V5.20.

Most. More full-price, new TNTmips systems were shipped in March of 1995 than in any   month since MicroImages was incorporated in 1986.

Biggest. The most expensive multi-user, single-processor TNTmips system to date was   shipped.

Smallest. As a counter balance, lowest-cost, single-user TNTmips for use on portables with   640 by 480 resolution at $3000 were also shipped with exactly the same application   features.

Largest. The largest single sale of TNTmips multi-user and multiple workstation platforms   was shipped.

Improved Reliability.

Quality control of complex software requires constant vigilance. At this point it appears that V4.90 of the TNT products were not particularly more or less reliable than those of other separate image processing and GIS systems shipped from competitors who also supply massive software products. Software defects in any product are of major concern to you when they suddenly occur in the middle of a critical project. You may think that developers do not check for, or care about such product defects. However, they are even more of a concern to the developers like MicroImages who then have to solve these problems at hundreds or thousands of sites around the world at considerable cost in money, reputation, and other forward motion.

MicroImages does take particular pride in the speed in which our inevitable defects are resolved. When the X server defect created by Microsoft was discovered last quarter, a general correction was immediately shipped because it affected every client. And, the questions that arise in about 80% of the voice calls for technical support are answered within 24 hours. The majority of the defects reported by FAX and email take somewhat longer as they usually require written answers. During this quarter MicroImages will be setting up complete versions of TNTmips on our FTP site so that you can more easily obtain a corrected copy of any and all processes throughout the quarter. This will enable you to automatically obtain the correct processes and will also provide earlier access to features being added for the next quarterly release. Details on this new service will be provided as they become available.

Take a minute to review the record of the big boys in the software business for the last 3 months.

Apple has just released the first general fix for the several ways you can hang the Mac OS 7.5 and which has been shipping for over a year (MicroImages ordered this fix 6 weeks ago and still does not have it).

Microsoft is about to release a free "maintenance upgrade" for defects in Microsoft Word 6.0 which has been shipping for 9 months for the Macintosh (announced 3 months ago but has not yet shipped to anyone).

Microsoft has just released a free "maintenance upgrade" for Windows NT 3.5 to 3.51 (this was shipped to MicroImages promptly under our developer support - part of it is available to all as a patch via Internet).

Microsoft Office 4.2 for the Mac is in such bad shape that they not only have had to offer a free upgrade to 4.2.1, but add on a 90 day money back guarantee for the upgrade to get buyers to even try it (This was offered 4 weeks ago and probably will not be received for some time unless you buy a new product).

Windows 95 final beta release crashes when multiple tasks are started (simply wait for the next beta release).

And of most importance, Microsoft has needed to release a free "maintenance upgrade" for Windows 3.1 for at least 2 years.

And these are the operating systems and tools we all have to deal. Certainly the world would be an easier place for all of us if Bill Gates adopted a policy (which it seems he may now be doing) that his products do have defects and set out to more promptly fix them (perhaps with quarterly upgrades via generic CDs?).

It may seem that the specific software you have purchased has all the defects while the competition does not. This perception is often created by the fact that your expectations and knowledge are rightfully high for the product you selected and purchased but that correspondingly you are unaware of the defects in the competing products. Complex software products will have defects. It's how they get fixed that really counts!

After these excuses, MicroImages is able to report that fewer defects were reported and resolved in V4.90 than in any previous version of the TNT products. However certain processes still remain defect prone until they are rewritten, restructured, and modernized. The processes for interactively editing vectors and CAD objects will continue to have defects and idiosyncrasies even in V5.00, albeit fewer than before. The good news is that the completely new TNT object editor is well underway and has been released in V5.00 as an incomplete work in progress for your inspection and comments. This new editor is now more than 1/2 complete and will be finished for V5.10.

Some minor irritating defects also remain in the 3D display process. However, this process is also scheduled for a complete overhaul for rerelease in V5.10 with better integration with the 2D display process as well as advanced features.

The DEM/ortho process has been significantly improved but will receive additional intense effort for V5.10.

Other current, minor processes which are usable, but which require minor overhaul, modernization, and extension are the Fourier Analysis, Raster Watershed, Progressive Transform, Polygon Fitting (vector home range), and Trend Removal processes.

New Features.

The most significant modification in V5.00 of the TNT products is the addition of the pyramiding of rasters to the RVC Project File structure. This markedly increases the speed with which rasters are used in those processes which have been modified to support it, particularly 2D display. Raster objects may now be automatically pyramided when you import them. Existing raster objects can be pyramided in place without rewriting them using an RVC maintenance operation. Furthermore, the addition of pyramiding to the 2D display process uncovered several ways to decrease display time in almost all TNT processes, even when the raster object is not pyramided!

Several clients at V5.00 beta sites have reported that the significance of this new concept is equivalent to that of buying a new and faster computer. The implementation and integration of this feature with the tiling, buffering, and other advanced features in the RVC structure took only a few days. MicroImages is thus reflecting on why this feature was not added earlier, since it was designed over 18 months ago when everyone was using those sluggish 486 based machines with display boards designed for DOS. It was only added at this point because of a client's need to handle an existing massive RVC based image dataset. Actually, a lot of little pieces had to be added to the TNT product design over the last 18 months to make this important feature "easy to add".

The first of many "pink" TNT Advisory windows will now pop in when you display a raster object(s) which would display much faster if you took the time to pyramid it (them). This was a last minute addition to V5.00, but you will see more and more of these unobtrusive advisory windows in processes where many approaches are available to you, but one is more effective (faster, more accurate, less memory intensive, less drive space used, etc.).

The interface of 2D display and several other processes have been markedly changed by the addition of toolbars with color button icons and ToolTips (pop-in icon titles as used in Microsoft Word 6.0). In all, 64 color icons have been added (with more coming). The purpose of each is easily determined by simply touching the cursor to the icon button to instantly see its 1 to 3 word ToolTip description before selecting it (e.g., Open, Straighten Line, Copy Element, Zoom 4X, etc.). Using icons significantly increases the speed with which you can interact with those processes that contain them.

Other significant changes have been added for the display of rasters. First there is the extension of the geographic locking feature first introduced in V4.80. It has now been expanded to support the setup, display, locking, scrolling, etc. of stereo images in high quality full color or black and white. Only an inexpensive stereo viewing device is required. Another, often requested addition, is the provision for the display and control of other color models including HIS, HBS, RGBI, and RGBB for such purposes as the direct combination and display of images from mixed sensors.

The rewrite of a second generation DEM/orthophoto process is well underway, resulting in a completely new and more accurate relative orientation process (epipolar solution) coupled with improved and more flexible controls. A new related process is available which finds the points of inflection in a surface raster (mountain peaks, bottoms of holes, etc.) and creates a vector object from them. Another new tool shows a profile and statistics of a line interactively drawn in the display of a TIN object.

A new process for filtering vectors is provided to assist you in screening and correcting your complex vector objects for such artifacts as overshoots and sliver polygons as well as supporting the thinning of lines by several methods. These new functions may be used in an automatic fashion with your parameters in a vector-object-in / vector-object-out (VIVO) fashion.

Two new kinds of raster legends can now be created for addition to your final products. A color spread legend can be designed for such situations as those using a color-coded grayscale image. A color class or cell identification legend can also be constructed.

The DOS MIPS classic "color crispy filter" has been improved and released. It allows the sharpening of any RGB display by automatically converting the rasters used to hue, intensity, and saturation, applying the sharpening filter you select or design to the intensity component, and then converting back to RGB raster objects. Also a new process for applying morphological functions has been added to the menu.

The ISOCLAS clustering or unsupervised image processing feature which was not complete in time for inclusion in V4.90 is now available.

This version of the TNT products for Microsoft Windows 3.11 (MSW3.11) can be installed with its MI/X server for immediate operation under the prerelease version of Microsoft Windows 95.

And last, but not least, is the long awaited release of the TNTmips products for both the Apple Macintosh and Power Macintosh platforms. These particular versions of the TNTmips products have and are causing almost as much effort to MicroImages as the original support of the UNIX based platforms. Perhaps this is why almost all of our major competitors' products are not available for these Macintoshes?

Plans for V5.10.

Some of the more significant new features which have already been undertaken for possible release in V5.10 are as follows:

• icons for all main menu items and some subprocesses (e.g., each import / export function) can be selected and placed into user created and customized toolbar windows for direct access;
• display 3D will be rewritten and integrated with display 2D and incorporate new features (thus display 3D becomes a part of TNTview as well);
• stereo viewing process will be integrated with display 2D and 3D and offer a much wider range of stereo visualization options (e.g., contours, DEM/ortho, perspective, TIN, and other 3D surfaces can be selected and displayed for viewing in the stereo);
• a floating drawing tool approach will be added to allow simple 3D measurement tools to be used while viewing in stereo;
• multiple database records will be viewable in a single scrolling window with control over its layout and a column or field summary line at the bottom;
• a thematic (choropleth) mapping interface will be added to more easily use attributes to control the display of polygons (e.g., show the polygons of each state filled with color according to population over 21 years of age);
• interactively designing a chain or pipeline of several vector operations in a new process;
• direct interactive application of spatial filters only to the inside of a polygon;
• ability to query and display information from one object based upon an area selected in the currently displayed object (e.g., show all the drainage and wells in a hydrologic vector object for a polygon area drawn on a view of a highway vector object or an orthophoto);
• compute and optionally save additional real and fuzzy properties of vector objects with associated display tools (e.g., a histogram display for the frequency of occurrence of all lines which might be overshoots as a function of length);
• quintic surface interpolation process to produce smooth contours from TIN objects;
• new autocorrelation process to complete the revised DEM / ortho process;
• linking of CAD objects in RVC Project File directly to the AutoCAD *.DXF and MapInfo *.MIF files for direct reading, display, and other processes without any need to import these files;
• new installation process to automatically set up icons to run all TNT products under Microsoft Windows 3.1; and
• MI/X (MicroImages X Server) for the Macintosh and Power Macintosh.

Windows NT 3.5

Microsoft has issued a maintenance upgrade for Windows NT 3.5 designated as service patch 2. Patch 2 has been included on your CD-ROM with V5.00 of the TNT products and can also be obtained via Internet from ftp.microsoft.com. This service patch solves at least one problem which is that now at least the quad speed CD-ROM drives using the IDE controller in the Gateway 2000 will now work with MSNT3.5 as patched.

As a developer, MicroImages has also just received a Microsoft CD-ROM containing a "maintenance release" identified as V3.51ß. At this writing the defects solved by this release have not yet been evaluated. Thus, MicroImages continues to recommend that there are no particular performance reasons to move your TNT products to MSNT unless you want access to the expanded network features it provides (and a lot of new installation headaches).

IMPORTANT NOTICE: MicroImages hereby announces that this shipment of V5.00 of the TNT products is the last version which will support Microsoft Windows NT 3.1. Effective with the shipment of V5.10 of the TNT products MicroImages will be able to provide support and products only to those clients who have upgraded to run MSNT3.5. At, or just after the shipment of V5.10, MicroImages will purge all copies of MSNT3.1 from our development machines.

Windows 95

MicroImages has just received a developers copy of the "final" beta release of this Microsoft product. Some of you also have noted that you have this early prerelease version as well. MicroImages is pleased to announce that V5.00 for MSW3.11 of the TNT products including the MI/X Server installed normally and operated immediately under W95 without alteration. The speed of the user interface is approximately the same as operating directly under MSW3.11. Simply install and use the MSW3.11 version of V5.00 if you are already experimenting with W95.

MI/X (MicroImages' X Server)

X Server for Apple Mac. The development of X Servers for the Apple Macintosh and Power Macintosh has absorbed quite a bit of effort this quarter. Unfortunately, it is difficult to judge at this time what portion of this complex task has been completed.

Upgrading from DOS MIPS

A total of 87% of all MicroImages clients since 1986 are now using a version of TNTmips. However, there are still some holdouts continuing to use the DOS MIPS product. Each quarter some of the old DOS MIPS (or early TNTmips) users upgrade from way back to the current version. More and more frequently this is happening because their old equipment has failed and can no longer be repaired or replaced to operate DOS MIPS. An example of at least one software package which outlasted its host machine. Also many have gradually found that they have stressed the limits of DOS (file sizes, flexibility, etc.) which they also find as limits within MIPS.

MicroImages understands that a few clients with early versions have gone on to other activities, left the company, or become unhappy with MicroImages. However, MicroImages finds over and over in contacts with most clients who still operate MIPS, that they report that they do not yet have appropriate equipment (e.g. still using a slow 386 with 1 to 4Mb of memory) or dislike windows oriented software. Obtaining proper equipment for the operation of TNTmips 5.0 is no longer a major impediment for many as the most advanced workstation equivalent Pentium 100 MHz, complete with a 17" 1280 by 1024 pixel display is now only $3000 from Gateway, Dell, and other vendors with no extras needed (see details below).

Correspondingly, those clients who have resisted the onslaught of windows oriented software are now rapidly discovering that many other popular software packages or upgrades also cannot be obtained for DOS. For example, there is no major IPS or GIS software which is not windows oriented. This easily predicted evolution in the operation of all desktop software is the reason MicroImages and all other commercial software vendors undertook the conversion to windows interfaces over the last 3 years. Fortunately, this conversion has lead to a modularity within the TNT product line whereby MicroImages can more easily add new functionality to adapt to the needs of our client base.

MicroImages would like to remind the remaining users of MIPS that by updating to TNTmips 5.0 for less than $1000 (see tables below) that they will have the most current version of a modern, state-of-the art, integrated IPS and GIS software system whose current purchase price would be $5000 to $8000. It thus seems logical to consider spending $3000 on a computer which is many times faster than the old one you are using and secure a completely new and faster software system.

TNTmips^TM 5.0

If you have subscribed to TNTmips 5.0, please proceed to install it from the V5.00 TNT product CDs following the instructions provided by the INSTALL process on either disk or in the Detailed Installation and Optimization Manual. If you did not order TNTmips 5.0, and wish to do so now, please contact MicroImages by FAX or phone to arrange to purchase your quarterly upgrade to V5.00. MicroImages will immediately supply you with an authorization code by FAX. Entering this code when running the installation process will allow you to complete the installation and immediately start to use TNTmips 5.0 and the other TNT products.

If you do not have an annual subscription to TNTmips, you can purchase V5.00 under the elective upgrade plan at the cost in the table below. Please remember that new features have been added to TNTmips with each quarter. Thus, the more quarters you are behind V5.00, the higher your upgrade cost, up to a limit. Upgrades from all previous versions of MIPS and TNTmips 4.51 or earlier are the same, fixed cost shown below. As usual, there is no special additional charge for the upgrade of the peripheral support features, TNTlink, or TNTsdk which you may have added to your basic TNTmips system.

Within the NAFTA reselling area (Canada, U.S., and Mexico):

M50 is the new product code for the Apple Macintosh Mac OS 7.x versions and replaces their older designation as U45 for the Mac using A/UX.

Loading a full installation of TNTmips 5.0 onto your hard drive (exclusive of illustrations) requires the following storage space in megabytes.

There are no V5.00 TNT products on these CD-ROMs for the DEC 3000 or 5000 workstation platforms using ULTRIX or for the Data General workstation platforms using Aviion. These versions were temporarily deleted to make room on the 2 CD-ROMs for the 2 new Macintosh versions. V5.00 of the TNT products for the Aviion or ULTRIX platforms are not widely used and thus will now be provided on individual, custom made CD-ROMs. Subsequently, to accommodate these lower use products, a reduction in the size of all the executable files may be effected or a third CD will be added, particularly if support for one more new platform is added.

IMPORTANT NOTICE: MicroImages will no longer be able to supply the TNT products on floppy disks. Not a single copy of TNTmips 4.9 was requested for shipment on this media. It now appears that the conversion of professionals to CD-ROM is complete. In fact, more and more complaints are reported in the magazines leveled toward Microsoft and others for delivering their large products only on floppy disks. For example, Microsoft Office V4.2 is being supplied on 34 floppies and is very cumbersome to install.

TNTsdk^TM 5.0 for TNTmips 5.0

No special features were added to TNTsdk other than the quarterly improvements in existing functions and the additional functions added to TNTmips.

TNTview^TM5.0

All the applicable changes in the display program noted below including the use of pyramided raster objects are similarly available when TNTview 5.0 is installed.

TNTatlas^TMof San Francisco

Those clients familiar with Microsoft Windows have pointed out that it is quite easy to print any of the San Francisco TNTatlas screens at any point in the operation of this HyperIndex® stack without purchasing the separate Pizzaz Plus color printing product. Simply start the clipboard (MSW3.1) or clipbook (MSNT3.5) program. At any place in TNTatlas (or any TNT product) capture the contents of the display screen to the clipboard by pressing the Print Screen key. Then suspend the TNTatlas and access the clipboard / clipbook with the other software within which you wish to use the screen and trim, annotate, insert, and print it (Paint Brush works well). Finally, simply reactivate and continue using TNTatlas from the point of its suspension. If you can use the clipbook program (in MSNT), then you can capture multiple screens at various points during the operation of a TNT product and similarly access and use all of them later.

A list of your suggestions for the improvement of the prototype San Francisco TNTatlas has been maintained. If you do not see your ideas below please communicate them to MicroImages.

• Support a "demo" or self running mode for unattended operation.
• Add manual entry of GPS values.
• Improve the art work of the screens.
• Supply more technical information regarding installation, X Server problems, etc. in an appendix of the manualette.
• Incorporate pyramiding concept (done).
• Reformat 8.5 by 11" paper printed data index.
• Provide a fully automatic install program for MSW3.11 (underway).
• Add a smaller, simpler Crow Butte stack with smaller objects for faster demonstration.
• Change measurement tool to eliminate white on white.
• Provide notice to user that the select action is underway.
• Set the "Show Index Areas" to default to off (done).
• Modify TNTlink so that author can set index areas on/off by object.
• Reprocess SPOT and color-infrared air photos with revised DEM/ortho process.

TNTdemo^TM 5.0

No changes have been made in the TNTdemo software or program for this quarter except that purchasers will not automatically receive the DEC ULTRIX or Data General Aviion versions unless they specifically request them.

On-Line Documentation

Two documenters have recently left MicroImages to start their own businesses. This is a total of three in the past year. This is a good score for MicroImages' spin-off business incubation, but it also takes time to hire and train such staff. Thus, several of the new features added to V5.00 are not yet documented even though the size of the printed version increased by 85 pages to a total of 1822 singled-spaced printed pages.

Seven small last minute documentation sections were completed for the newest features in V5.00 after the master disks were created for the reproduction process. These 33 additional pages are included in supplemental, printed form as follows.

Multiple Component Raster Display (4 pages)

Relief Shading (4 pages)

Raster Pyramiding (4 pages)

Vector Filtering (6 pages)

Raster Morphology (9 pages)

Appendix 2: TNTmips Icons (6 pages)
 

Apple Macintosh via System 7.x.

The TNT products on CD-ROM for V5.00 now include versions for the Apple Macintosh computers using either Motorola 68030, 68040, 601, or 603 processors. All internal TNTmips processes and capabilities are available for either Mac or Power Mac platforms and have been tested reasonably thoroughly. There may still be undiscovered defects and idiosyncrasies in the Mac versions which are unique to this platform and any reported will be immediately fixed.

For acceptable performance, MicroImages recommends that the TNT products be used on Macintosh models which are equal or faster in performance to a Quadra 700 and only with an auxiliary math coprocessor chip. This math coprocessor is an integral part of the Power Mac but is optional with some 680xx Macs. The version of TNTmips for the Quadra and other 680xx Macs is compatible with Mac OS 7.1.x or 7.5.x. The TNT products for the Power Mac require Mac OS 7.5 or 7.5.1. The suggested minimum RAM memory is 16 megabytes.

X-Server. 

As has been previously announced, MicroImages has only partially completed developing an X server for the Mac platforms. It is planned that this MI/X server will be available with V5.10 in June. For V5.00, MicroImages will purchase and ship without extra charge the eXodus X server manufactured by White Pine software with each copy of TNTmips ordered for use on a Macintosh. A flier describing this eXodus product is enclosed. The eXodus X server has been used exclusively during development and testing by MicroImages for the Mac platform and will be provided with versions for the 680xx and Power PC systems.

The eXodus X server is not protected but is a copyrighted and licensed commercial product. Therefore it cannot be placed on the V5.00 CD-ROMs for the TNT products. However, MicroImages will also provide a copy of this eXodus product (normal cost of $300) at our volume cost of $170 plus shipping for any existing client who also wants to use either or both Mac versions. Before ordering, please remember that to use either Mac version you will need to have an authorization key available with a current TNT product code of D50 or U100 or higher since these Macintosh products use a product code level of M50.

Performance. 

The following chart provides comparative performance for TNTmips 5.0 on the Macintosh and PCs using Microsoft Windows 3.11. All computers had built-in or add-on floating point processors! All tests were performed with data which is available on the CD-ROM of the San Francisco sample TNTatlas but which was transferred to an external SCSI hard drive on the test machine. The times listed do not include the time to load the particular process but only the time to perform the analysis operation described. The Mac computers used in the tests were standard machines unaltered except for the addition of the larger external SCSI hard drive.

[test A] Raster. Displaying a 10 Mb single band 8-bit grayscale image which is stored as a linked TIFF file. This was the blue band of photo 145 in the Hayward NHAP airphoto series titled 145_BLUE.TIF. The entire image was displayed which required resampling of the entire raster object. The final view was rotated and rescaled somewhat so that extensive use was made of the affine transformation. The raster object was transferred for this test to the local hard drive.

[test B] Raster with Pyramiding. The same as [test A] except the raster object was pyramided.

[test C] Vector lines only. Displaying all the line elements from the 10 Mb of the Solano County vector object imported from the TIGER data of that county. Since all the line elements were displayed, this required that all their coordinates be recomputed in the process using the affine approximation method. Only the simple default color line styles were selected for the display.

[test D] Vector lines and polygons. Displaying both line and polygon elements from the 10 Mb of the Solano County vector object imported from the TIGER data of that county. Since all elements were displayed, this required that all their coordinates be recomputed using the affine approximation method. Only the simple default color line and polygon styles were selected for the display.

All test times within the tables are in seconds and are preceded by the ratio of the time required to that required on the 486/25 base or reference machine. Thus (2.7X) 205 indicates that the time to complete was 205 seconds which is 2.7 times as longer than the same test on the 486/25 reference machine. The Quadras all used Mac OS 7.1 and the Power Mac used Mac OS 7.5.

The tests on the Quadra 800 with eXodus and also without eXodus via remote X terminal were performed to determine the impact of the eXodus X server on the performance of TNTmips on the Mac. The results show that the use of this X server in the operation of these TNTmips processes on the Mac did not have a particularly detrimental effect, in fact TNTmips use via a remote X terminal was slower. The reason for the additional time required for remote access can be attributed to network overhead although these tests were run with minimal network traffic.

Additional tests were performed on the Power Macs using the 680xx versions TNTmips in emulation mode but provided slower results than when used directly on a 68040 based Quadra. This method of operation is not warranted as the native Power PC version of TNTmips is available.

Comments on Performance. 

The general interpretation of these tables is that both Macs are slow in comparison to PCs, and even the original Power Mac 6100 is approximately 1/2 the performance of the 486/25. Every Mac owner knows this but pure speed is not their criterion for the selection and use of a Mac. Ease of use and performance of the user interface are more important criteria. For example, the interface activity in TNTmips via eXodus on the Mac is considerably faster than via MSW3.1 and approaches that of a workstation using an X server.

An additional plus for the Mac is that it treats the X Window used by TNTmips as just another window opened by an application. It can be resized, repositioned, and operated just like anything else on the Mac desktop. Thus you may use any amount of Mac display area you have which provides 256 or more colors (e.g. 8-, 16-, or 24-bit color). Existing dual or triple screen display setups are automatically supported. For example, where a Mac window can be expanded or dragged across color monitors to create a larger desktop spanning several monitors, then your TNTmips display window can be expanded to that size.

MicroImages may also be contributing to the slower performance on the Mac in managing the way in which the Mac OS multi-finder currently runs independent programs by sharing time equally between the 3 processes: X server, TNT Menu, and a TNT application (e.g. 2D display). This is similar to the way things started out on the PC platforms. Eventually MicroImages figured out how to properly control this sharing to balance the time of service from the system software and CPU for the X server, TNT Menu, and TNT application process. This interprocess tuning is the area in which MicroImages needs to expend effort but which will be more fruitfully spent when our own source code is available for the X server.

Mac users are also quite familiar with the fact that the Mac OS does not yet dynamically reallocate real or virtual memory as does Microsoft Windows. Memory being used by other currently suspended processes in the Mac OS finder is not reallocated to the active process. Serious Mac users overcome this by putting more real memory into their Macs than PC users employ.

Unfortunately, the software engineer must allocate a fixed amount of memory for each individual Mac process to use. This allocation can be subsequently altered by the user of the software but is still fixed in amount. Adding virtual memory to the Mac OS does nothing to alter this situation except provide more memory (and much slower memory) for manual allocation. All Mac users are familiar with the effect of this limitation where they must manually make more memory available to a particular software package to do a more complicated task.

The MicroImages software engineer has the problem that if too large a block of memory is allocated as the default, the process will always "virtualize" to get this memory and thus drastically slow down. The default allocations of memory for TNTmips on the Mac platforms will complete moderately sized tasks. However, the memory allocation for a specific TNT process may have to be increased for a larger task as MicroImages cannot automatically reallocate any unused available memory or the memory used by other active, but suspended programs (e.g. Mac OS, X server, Menu, etc.).

Comparison between Macs. 

It is important to note when comparing their performance that the Mac Quadras and current Power Mac both use the same bus, drive speed, and format. Furthermore, Apple has not yet rewritten the Mac OS file system - the software that deals with disk I/O - to run in native mode on Power Macs. Every software package compiled in native mode for the Power Mac must still go through 680xx emulation and switching each time between 32-bit to 16-bit for every read or write operation performed. This includes those conditions under which software executing on a Power Mac has to begin to use virtual memory instead of real memory. Thus, for any native Power Mac application such as TNTmips which requires massive I/O activity (alternating between reading, processing, and writing massive data sets) the slowdown can become particularly significant as the process switches millions of times between native and emulated mode. As a result, and probably at least until Mac OS 8.0 is released, those TNTmips operations which require a lot of disk I/O in relation to computation will not vary greatly in performance between the two types of Macs and can even be slower on the Power Mac, whereas those with intense mathematical operations will be significantly improved on the Power Mac.

A chart enclosed with V5.00 from MacWorld verifies this. It shows that computationally oriented CAD and image processing processes run as much as 3 times faster in native code on a Power Mac relative to a 680xx based Mac. Conversely, Microsoft Word 6.0 for the Power Mac, even in native code is only 1.1 times as fast on a Power Mac as on a 680xx based Mac as word processing is almost all string manipulation and disk access. Also notice for many products on the chart that disk I/O operations such as opening, sorting, importing, and print to disk are often slower on the Power Mac.

Prices. 

The prices for either, or both Mac versions of TNTmips are shown on the new price sheet enclosed. Please note that the price of TNTmips for the Mac is independent of the display resolution, in contrast to the TNTmips prices for the Microsoft Windows based platforms which are still based upon maximum display resolution.

Peripherals. 

Only limited, direct support for Mac peripherals is currently available. Scanner support is not of particularly high priority since every scanner added to a Mac comes with software which will scan into a TIFF file which can be immediately linked to and used by TNTmips. X-Y digitizers are not yet directly supported. Printing and film recorder can be used if the product code P8 is available to support the creation of TIFF and PostScript files but direct printing to PostScript printers is not yet working.

Free Upgrade. 

Since there may still be idiosyncrasies in a few processes on the Mac and the support of peripherals, MicroImages will automatically upgrade anyone ordering TNTmips 5.0 [product M50] for the Macintosh to V5.10 (June) and then add on the free-for-registration version V5.20 (September).

Authorization Key. 

The V5.00 TNT products for the Mac require a blue or red serial key which will be provided with the appropriate adapter to connect to the small Mac DIN serial connector. Your Mac must an have an available, empty serial connector to attach this key.

V5.10 of the TNT products will also offer an alternate type of key for the Mac. This key is unique to the Macintosh products and does not require any standard port since it attaches anywhere in the Apple Desktop Bus (ADB) and is transparent. The ADB is the special bus which connects the Apple mouse and keyboard to the main chassis. This ADB authorization key is simply a 10 centimeter piece of cable with a small bulge in the middle for the electronics and with male and female connectors which allow it to be placed anywhere "in-line". MicroImages has these ADB keys, but they were not yet supported at the time of the preparation of CD-ROMs for V5.00.

Installation. 

The Mac installation program was not available at the time of the cut-off of the preparation of the V5.00 CD-ROMs. It will be supplied for V5.00 as a Mac program on a Mac formatted floppy disk which will be shipped along with the eXodus X Server to existing or new clients ordering the Mac version.

TNTdemo. 

The $200 access via TNTdemo to try V5.00 on the Macintosh platforms is not directly available. MicroImages is currently supplying the copyrighted $170 eXodus X Server with each TNTmips for the Mac. It was not possible to include this unprotected eXodus product on the standard CD-ROM for the purposes of supporting the TNTdemo concept. When the MI/X Server for the Mac is complete, it will be possible to include it (and the installation program) on the normal CD-ROMS to support the routine demo trial of both of the Mac versions. However, temporarily a special TNTdemo kit can be assembled including eXodus for both the Macs (and all other platforms as usual) for $370 which would then be refunded upon subsequent purchase of TNTmips for the Mac.

TNTatlas. 

Again, since the unprotected MI/X server is not available, it is not yet possible to add the Mac software to the "run-time", keyless, licensed version of the TNTatlas.

New Price List

A new composite price list is enclosed. Please note that it does not reflect any changes in prices but simply adds the minor price changes and adjustments announced in previous quarters. These past adjustments, which are consolidated together in this price list include the increased subscription price for the international sites to pay for the express shipment of upgrades, the revised price for the native Macintosh products, the deleting of printer support P15 from the workstation bundle, and other previously announced minor adjustments.

The complete contents for a new TNT Price and Reference Information folder (previously distributed with a green cover) are now complete and ready for reproduction. This reference folder will be distributed to all clients in a separate mailing during the next quarter. This same folder has, and will continue to be sent, together with the separate product brochures and sample TNTatlas CD to all parties who request material about the TNT products directly from MicroImages.

New TNTmips Features

* Paragraphs or main sections preceded by this symbol "*" introduce significant new processes, or features in existing processes, which are released for the first time in TNTmips 5.0.

System Level.

* The X Window System window manager (TWM) has been modified to provide an icon on the menu bar line to raise or lower the current window.

* A preferences option has been added to tell processes not to wait for "OK" to be pressed in the status dialog when the process completes. This can save time in repetitive tasks.

The cursor is now automatically moved to a newly-opened dialog if that dialog must be closed before proceeding. This option may be turned off using Support / Setup / Preferences.

The last-used zone for each map coordinate system is retained as the default for the next time that coordinate system is used. For example, the last-used UTM zone will be automatically selected the next time the UTM coordinate system is used.

Project File Maintenance.

The size of the currently selected object (in bytes) is displayed in the object information window.

* User Interface.

Now that more software engineering time is available, MicroImages is putting a portion of it into improving, streamlining, simplifying, and organizing the user interface of the TNTmips products. This is not simply a matter of making interfaces "prettier" but also making them more efficient to use.

In general MicroImages is not trying to invent new user interface components, but simply applying approaches used in other popular PC, Mac, or workstation packages. Microsoft Word 6.0 was the model for the new interface changes added in V5.00 except for the drop-down dialog box extensions which are common in Mac software.

User interface alterations do not automatically become part of every TNT process overnight. A specific software engineer is assigned the responsibility or volunteers to implement the library functions and changes and then modifies one or more of their processes to reflect the improvements. This takes most of a quarter so these improvements may only be introduced in a couple of processes. Subsequently, all other software engineers must take the time to modify all the processes for which they are responsible to use these new, standard interface components. Thus please be patient while these and future interface changes migrate into other processes.

Icons. 

By popular demand, 64 push-button style, color icons are being introduced in V5.00 in the display (viewing), feature mapping, and prototype object editor as well as several miscellaneous situations. These icons may be best thought of as push-buttons as they are not the larger, "free roaming" program icons with fixed text descriptions under them popular in representing programs and datasets in MSW3.1 and the Mac OS. Push-button icons generally occupy defined positions within a toolbar, window frame, or some other outlining structure.

A color reference chart of the V5.00 icons is attached. They can also be directly viewed with more expanded description in Appendix 2 of the on-line documentation. Where some sort of standard icon was already in wide use, its appearance has been duplicated. Where unique TNT actions are being represented, the icon is of MicroImages' design. More icons will be added as the need for them occurs during the upgrade of other processes to use them. However, all icons are read from a common reference file so that each process will use the same icon for the identical action.

The dominant color of a push-button icon will often tell you the functional group to which it belongs. For example, blue is the dominant color of the view icons, and yellow is used for file oriented actions. Characters will not be used within TNT icons, thus the typical "ABC" is not used to represent access to character actions (except for the temporary use of the letter "A"). Incorporating Roman characters into icons is not good design for internationalized software and begins to defeat the purpose of using icons. However, Arabic numbers are allowed, such as in the integer zoom icons, as MicroImages has found that almost everyone, world-wide, at all educational levels, immediately recognizes them.

Toolbars. 

A toolbar is a strip or row of icons presented along one edge of a window to provide rapid, easy mouse selection of specific actions. The TNT toolbar presents the icons in fixed positions across the top of the window. Icons for closely related actions are grouped close together in the bar with somewhat more space between these functional groups. The total length of every toolbar is currently limited so all of it will be exposed on the screen of a portable 640 by 480 pixel screen which has the window open to its maximum extent.

In Word 6.0 you can take icons on and off the toolbar; move the bar to the top, bottom, left or right of the window; and create several toolbars. These features are not available at this time in the TNT products, and the TNT toolbars are fixed across the top of the window. It is more important at this time to get toolbars and icons into more processes before adding these cosmetic and user customizing features.

ToolTips. 

Microsoft first introduced the concept of ToolTips in Word for Windows 6.0 At least three lines of toolbars of many push-button, color icons can be optionally displayed in Word 6.0. This, coupled together with the large number of icons in Word, and potentially in the TNT products, necessitates a very quick way of associating a brief description of the action they take.

A ToolTip is simply a small box with a yellow background containing generally 1 to 3 words of text which will pop-in next to and below the icon. Simply moving the cursor over the icon and hesitating for 1/2 second without any selection action (mouse click) will automatically expose the ToolTip for that icon. Move the mouse off the icon and the ToolTip will disappear.

After a few minutes of use of this simple, but innovative concept you will quickly realize how well the human brain integrates 1 or 2 small words of text and a color drawing into a temporary list of actions. Often this "local" use of your short time memory is not retained until the next day or even between processes, but is very easily restored to short term memory in just one minute of reassociation. Simply traverse the mouse along the toolbar stopping over each icon to reassociate its ToolTip description with the icon's appearance. In many ways it is one of the simplest, yet most useful, interface components recently introduced into "point and click" graphical user interfaces!

Text for all the ToolTips is contained in the TNTMIPS.RES file with the menu, button, and other similar text. ToolTip text can be converted to your language if you can currently translate your user interface using 1-byte character sets. A non-English user of the TNT products will get the greatest language change benefit from a translation of this ToolTip text so that the push-button icon and the text are associated immediately in your native language. A lot of the associative properties of this approach are lost if the English version of the ToolTips must be constantly, mentally translated to your native language, even for those very familiar with English as a second language. Please note that when translating the English text to your language, it is not necessary to preserve any equivalent or fixed number of characters or glyphs as each ToolTip can be of any character length up to the width of your screen.

TNT Advisory Window. 

A new interface component is introduced in V5.00 to help you make the transition to applying pyramiding to your Project Files. This new TNT Advisory window has a pink background to attract your attention and will pop into your view while you display any raster which has not been pyramided and if the display operation would benefit from it. It does not stop or delay the display in any way but will advise you that the raster might display faster if you first applied pyramiding to it.

TNT Advisory windows will appear in other processes in future releases where flexibility and multiple means are provided to accomplish a task, but where advice from MicroImages is appropriate to indicate that a more efficient procedure is available. Examples of other possible future uses of a TNT Advisory windows would be when it is detected in the repetitive use of a complex map layout that you are continually rotating a raster 90 degrees. Another example would be to indicate that a given process such as an image classification would be much faster if read from one hard drive and written to another.

You can control whether or not each individual Advisory window appears and at what frequency (e.g. once every 5 times you use that not-pyramided raster). Software agents and advisory subsystems which monitor your use of software, but over which you have complete control, are a concept which will become popular, especially in connection with the use of Internet.

Drop-down dialog boxes. 

The initial exposure of some dialog boxes will now begin to appear smaller and simpler. The modified dialog boxes will present the basic controls and fields most often used and also used by beginners. However, they will now also provide one or more toggle buttons for access to more complex controls. When such a button is selected, the bottom of the dialog box is immediately expanded to present this new, functionally related group of controls. If you push the toggle button again or complete the action, the added or extended box area and controls will be immediately closed and the dialog box will be made smaller. In general, these functions are similar to the "more" button in other Mac and MSW3.1 applications.

The use of this concept is incorporated into V5.00 in the new Group Controls dialog box which is described in more detail below. This revised Group Controls dialog box now looks much smaller and simpler in its new form, but shows buttons for the drop-down of 3 extensions.

This change in the user interface is in response to many requests to make the TNT user interface easier and faster to use for everyone as well as less intimidating and complex to beginning or part-time users. These requests had to be balanced off against those of you (including MicroImages) who keep asking for more and more features and complexity in every process. It also addresses the problem of the continuous gradual tendency for the growth of all dialog boxes relative to the limited size of the displays of currently available portables. This drop-down approach was first suggested as a compromise by a client two years ago at AUW6 as although he was an advanced user, but was constantly dealing with other less experienced users.

* Raster Pyramiding.

Why was this added? The design and plans for the addition of the pyramiding to the Project File have been on the list of things to do for a couple of years. The need first became apparent when someone wanted to use DOS MIPS to mosaic color scans of all the 1:1,000,000 maps of Saudi Arabia into a single raster object. While it would work and would fit, displaying a full view screen area would take hours. These kinds of project needs and demands lead to the design of the tiling, pyramiding, buffering, etc. in the RVC Project File's raster objects.

About a year ago these needs were reinforced when TNTmips users began to acquire and process the Russian Priroda monochrome satellite images in single raster objects as large as 400 megabytes. At that time it also became apparent that the future 1 to 4 meter resolution commercial imaging satellites scheduled for launch in 1995 to 1997 could generate some very large raster objects.

The final spur to add this new feature was the release of the San Francisco TNTatlas. The time to view the predesigned image steps in this TNTatlas is quite reasonable. However, the first time you attempted to view at some other image scale things ground to a crawl. This was known to be a limitation on the TNTatlas but it was released to finally get some larger sample data into your hands. It was also marked (as noted above) as the first thing to solve to increase the usefulness of a TNTatlas containing large images. Frankly, had MicroImages realized how useful this alteration would become in the general use of TNTmips it would have received a higher priority much earlier. But, better late than never!

What is it? The raster pyramiding concept has been added to the tiling structure in the TNT Project File (*.RVC). This modification greatly speeds up all slower image displays in the TNT products on all platforms. The table below illustrates the remarkable speed increases which can be achieved by this feature. This benefit is not "free" as it does expand the size needed by a large raster object usually about 8%. However, with the cost of hard drive space plummeting monthly (currently US$0.35 per megabyte) this 8% loss is a very economical tradeoff since its use gives you back a great deal of your personal and computer time.

Conceptually pyramiding involves the automatic creation and management of subobjects called tiers (as in tiers of a pyramid) under each primary raster object. Please do not call them layers as this word is already defined for other uses in the TNT products. Furthermore, it is hoped that the word tiers conveys the appropriate mental image of each one being successively smaller than the base or primary raster object.

The sampling intervals used to produce the pyramid tiers or subobjects are determined automatically by an algorithm designed to optimize performance for commonly performed TNT processes while minimizing the overhead in added disk space requirements. Each new tier is created by sampling and storing the previous tier or the original raster object if no tiers yet exist. The sampling interval is determined by examining the dimensions of the previous tier (or the raster object itself). If the sum of the number of lines and columns is less than 4096 and both dimensions are greater than 512 the next sampling interval will be 2 by 2. Otherwise the next sampling interval will be 4 by 4. Tiers are created until either dimension is less than 16 or when both dimensions are less than 128. Further sampling beyond that point is of no benefit due to the way raster objects are stored in the Project File and buffered during access. The reason for the variable sampling intervals is to minimize the time to display a "full view" of the raster object within windows ranging from 128 by 128 pixels up to 2048 by 2048 pixels which covers most currently available display systems.

How does it help? In V4.90 and previously, when you zoom out from 1X (toward full view) the display process had to sample the entire raster. Now the display process simply selects the appropriate tier to resample and display. For example, if you request a full view, which is very common, there will always be a tier available which is just somewhat larger and which can be very rapidly read, buffered, and resampled.

The management of the pyramid tiers is transparent to you. Any raster object you import will be automatically pyramided unless you shut this feature off. But, for the time being, you must make a deliberate effort to create the pyramids for any raster object which you created in V4.90 on your system. And, the automatic pyramiding option has not yet been incorporated into all internal processes which can create a raster object, thus you will need to pyramid them as well so it is initially a display oriented feature. Eventually, all processes which can generate a new raster object will be adjusted to use, create, and manage a pyramided raster object. This will also add increased speed to some aspects of the application of these other processes.

The greatest increase in performance by pyramiding is with the biggest files and in a display situation which previously required the greatest resampling. For example, showing an entire SPOT image resampled to fit entirely in the current display window (i.e., the full view display of large color or monochrome raster objects). This is because these situations previously required the greatest amount of time to read and resample the large original raster object. However, the large relative improvement in such cases is also because the other situations such as 1:1 or full resolution displays were already very fast based upon tiling and other buffering schemes built into your Project Files over the past year.

Pyramiding does not discard the performance gains added via earlier changes in the Project File structure, but is integrated with them. Thus you end up with raster objects which are pyramided with each tier tiled using a tile size suitable for that tier. Then a sophisticated buffering scheme gets individual tiles (in most processes) from the most appropriate tier or horizontal or diagonal rows of tiles for processes which use the entire raster.

MicroImages does not claim to have invented any of the individual concepts now integrated into your Project Files. It is their careful blending and integration which continues to provide increased performance as raster sizes grow. Please also note that a variation on these schemes will eventually be added to Project File for vector, CAD, and TIN objects as they grow in size. It is one of MicroImages' often written technical claims that the data structures of an integrated GIS, IPS, CAD, ... , desktop mapping system is very important to its long term potential and continued usefulness. Since the early days of MIPS on 8086 and 8088 based desktop computers with 1 megabyte of memory and 20 megabyte hard drives MicroImages has spent a lot of time thinking about how to best manage these kinds of data structures for maximum performance.

How do I apply pyramiding? Raster objects which you import from other formats are automatically pyramided unless you turn the option off. An option to pyramid existing raster objects in a project file is located on the main menu at Prepare / Raster / Pyramid. It allows you to select the raster object(s), automatically performs the pyramid process and attaches the tiers as subobjects to the primary raster object.

It is important to note that the time required to pyramid an existing large raster object can be significantly less than attempting to display it a single time as full view! You will be alerted every time you display a raster object(s) which has not yet been pyramided and which will take more than 10 seconds to display. This unobtrusive advice is supplied via the new TNT Advisory window described above in the section on Interface Changes.

What are the benefits? The following presents comparative display times for PCs using 486 and 586 processors and with rasters displayed from CD-ROM and from hard drives. The times listed do not include the time to load the 2D display process but only the time to perform the display described. All images used in these tests are those provided on the San Francisco TNTatlas prototype CD-ROM and were displayed from CD or hard drive as noted.

The test 486/50 machine used MSW3.11, 16 Mb of memory, a 1X speed CD-ROM, a 2 mb Smartdrive, and 700 by 700 pixel window size of 8-bit color.

The test 586/90 machine used MSW3.11, 16 Mb of memory, a 4X speed CD-ROM, 2 mb Smartdrive, and a 1 Gb fast hard drive, and 700 by 700 pixel window size of 8-bit color.

All times in the tables are in seconds preceded by the ratio of the display time required in the test display to that of the same display test on the 486/50 base or reference machine. Thus (1.6X) 5 indicates that the time to complete display was 5 seconds which is 1.6 times as fast as the 8 seconds for the same display on the 486/25 base machine.

Test Screen. Direct 1X view of SPOT image index on the San Francisco CD-ROM as 8-bit composite color from 413 by 622 pixel raster object. 

Test SPOT. SPOT grayscale image, 6000 by 6000 pixel raster object linked to a compressed, tiled TIFF file.

[test S1 ] 1X view of a small portion of the SPOT image.

[test S2 ] a full 100% view of the same SPOT image.

[test S3 ] a 2X zoom in from the full 100% view of the same SPOT image.

Test Airphoto. Color-Infrared airphoto via RGB, 3669 by 3681 pixels raster objects each linked as a compressed, tiled TIFF files.

[test A1 ] 1X view of a small portion of the image displayed from 3 separate raster objects in the compressed, linked TIFF raster.

[test A2 ] the 100% view of the same full view of the same image.

[test A3 ] a 2X zoom in from the full 100% view of the same image.

SF CD = directly from prototype San Francisco TNTatlas CD-ROM shipped with V4.90.

Pyramid CD = prototype2 CD-ROM of San Francisco TNTatlas reprepared simply by pyramiding all raster objects from SF CD.

Pyramid HD = same Project File as Pyramid CD but transferred from CD-ROM to the hard drive.

Conclusions. Many kinds of raster displays in 2D display, and subsequently in most other TNT processes, will now be interactive in nature requiring 3 to 10 seconds on 586/90 and 586/100 based PC desktop computers. TNTmips systems on workstations will no longer be significantly faster for display simply due to their higher computational power. Even on a 486/33 PC machine, it will take less than 40 seconds to display any portion or all of any black and white or any RGB image of any size. This includes full size map scans or complete SPOT, Landsat TM, or 450 Mb Priroda images. This also includes displays made at any fractional zoom, rotation, and projection change.

The small remaining time to display most images in the TNT products is now directly controlled by the drive and bus access speeds of your computer platform. TNT products cannot display faster than your drive can be read and the data can be moved over the computer bus. Since the same hard drives are now being integrated into PCs, workstations, and Macs, the differentiating factor in raster displays in TNT products becomes the operating system's drive format and buffering, the type of drive controller used (SCSI, fast SCSI, IDE, etc.), and the bus transfer rates.

The advanced, unique TNT Project File data structure is not available in ERDAS, ERmapper, PCI, and other IPS systems. Thus, they are currently unable to come close to matching the display speeds in V5.00 on any of the platforms they support. It should be possible for these vendors to add pyramiding as an optional feature for raster management. However, controlling which raster has pyramids and keeping track of where they are will be more difficult for their users due to the absence of the integrated Project File structure.

* 2D Viewing

Even Faster Viewing. The display of rotated rasters (pyramided or not) has been improved in all processes through the use of all-integer computation for the affine resampling process. This improvement is most noticeable on pre-Pentium machines (e.g. 486 based) where floating-point computation is much slower than integer computation. In addition, the display time when the "Null cells transparent" option is used has been dramatically reduced. With these improvements, and the use of pyramiding, it is now possible to realize display performance gains on your 486 based portables to out perform a Pentium based machine using V4.90! As one V5.00 beta tester comments below, if you are using a 486 based portable machine, using V5.00 is equivalent to buying a new Pentium based portable or desktop computer.

Part of this display improvement is a new function based on all integer computation that replaces the floating point computations in the resampling used in the viewing of a raster(s) via the "affine" (i.e., via reprojection) mode. This significantly decreased the time to view rasters in these modes to approximately equal the third "none" view mode available in V4.90. This "none" mode allowed only integer zooms (... 1/4X, 1/2X, 1X, 2X, ...) and only an upright orientation of the raster(s) which caused confusion. Also, almost every view you request uses some sort of resampling (fractional zoom = 1.27X, rotation, projection change, etc.). As a result the confusing "none" view mode has been moved to the Group Controls Window (see below) and all your complex displays are also significantly faster.

General Controls. A toolbar has been added in the View window which contains color icons for each option on the View menu. The "Draw", "Skip" and "Stop" icons were changed into color and moved onto the toolbar at the upper left.

A "Previous View" option has been added which will return to the previous position and zoom factor used after a zooming or panning operation.

A "Previous Zoom" option has been added which will return to the previously used zoom factor centered around the current location.

Groups can now be hidden using a new option. Like hidden layers, hidden groups still occupy space for positioning and attachment. They simply do not draw. This allows for more rapid viewing of the features within a group or with groups currently being altered. The hidden state of each group is recorded with the layout and therefore hidden groups will not print either. Note that when a group is "unhidden" it is not automatically drawn.

The reading of layouts having large numbers of groups and layers has been sped up. This was identified as a problem by users of the prototype San Francisco TNTatlas.

Object Selection. A "Quick-Add / Any..." option has been added which allows selection of any combination of raster, vector, CAD or TIN objects for adding as layers.

A "Quick-Add / Multi-Group..." option has been added which will automatically create a new "group" for each selected object layer. This allows rapid setup of "tiled" displays involving several objects (e.g. multi-band imagery).

Group Controls. The Group Controls dialog will be automatically opened when the user double-clicks on a group in the list of groups.

The Group Controls dialog box has been extensively redesigned. It now presents a main panel with the most frequently used basic controls. Three additional drop down panels can be turned on and off from the main panel via toggle buttons. As explained above in the section on Interface Changes, these panels provide the more detailed controls in these 3 functionally related, optional, extended dialog boxes.

The most important new option on the Group Controls dialog box is the "Auto-Match" option. When set, this option will override the orientation, rotation and projection settings and will use the appropriate layer to control these settings. This will result in the object being displayed "upright" in its coordinate system, which will not necessarily put North or the Projection northing at the top. In the case of rasters, this is equivalent to the Options / Resampling / None selection formerly available.

Also available on the Group Controls dialog box is a field for specifying the rotation of the group. Using this field allows the group to be rotated to any desired angle. A button is provided to automatically set the angle so that the currently selected layer appears "upright" in its object's coordinate system. Note that the Auto-Match option must also be set to "None" to use this feature.

The Options / Resampling selection has been renamed to "Positional Accuracy". The "None" option has been removed as it is now controlled using the Auto-Match option on the Group Controls dialog as described above.

Shaded Relief. An option has been added to the Raster Display Controls dialog to turn relief shading on and off. Relief shading enhancement settings are now saved with layouts and automatically used by the printing process, allowing shaded-relief images to be printed.

When relief shading is performed on RGBI or RGBB color combinations of rasters, the shading is done using the fourth raster. This shading is used to "modify" the intensity computed from the RGB rasters, rather than replace it. This allows production of full-color shaded-relief displays. Also, with proper orientation of the position of the sun, it is possible to reduce some of the shading effects visible in most satellite imagery and airphotos.

Color Models. Additional multi-band raster combinations have been added. These are hue-intensity-saturation (HIS), hue-brightness-saturation (HBS), red-green-blue-intensity (RGBI), and red-green-blue-brightness (RGBB). The HIS and HBS color models allow direct display (and printing) of rasters representing hue, intensity / brightness, and saturation without first having to convert these rasters to RGB. In addition, contrast enhancement may be performed on the intensity / brightness and saturation components. The RGBI and RGBB modes allow substitution of a co-registered raster for the intensity / brightness.

The traditional use of these models is to use higher-resolution panchromatic imagery (e.g. SPOT) for the intensity with lower-resolution color imagery (e.g. TM) for the RGB components to produce a "synthetic resolution" color composite. An illustration of this application occurs in the illustration of the Buckingham Place grounds in the enclosed paper entitled Yesterday's spies. However, it is only fair to note that Ren Capes prepared this illustration with an earlier version of TNTmips which required the more tedious sequence of steps involving many raster-object-in and raster-object-out (RIRO) operations.

In the more direct V5.00 implementation, all component rasters must still have the same dimensions and extents, so it is necessary to resample the lower resolution rasters to the same cell-size as the high-resolution raster. A future version will eliminate the need for this extra step. It will allow the direct fusion and viewing of any common area of images collected by different sensors with different cell sizes, map projections, scales, orientations, and so on.

* Profiles. It is now possible to display complex raster cell profiles in a Profile window. This feature is provided by the measurements tool. Profiles can be shown for multiple connected straight line segements, rectangles, circles, ellipses, and polygons. The resulting profile is displayed in the Profile window and you can select to display its Nth-order polynomial trend, first and second derivatives, semivariogram, autocorrelation, residuals, and grid lines. The following statistics can also be displayed: length, minimal, maximal, mean elevation, variance, standard deviation, corrected sum of squares, polynomial regression coefficients, goodness-of-fit, and multiple correlation coefficient. Multiple Profile windows may be opened each displaying a profile for the same feature but from several different raster objects (not being viewed). Each profile can also be saved as a 3D vector line in a vector object.

* Stereo Viewing (a work in progress)

A new stereo image viewing option allows the easy display, fusing, and movement of stereo pairs of images. It initially supports the use of mirror stereoscopes, "cross-eyed" stereo viewing, and the Cyberscope viewing device. It will allow fast stereo image alignment and "stereo locking" as it solves the epipolar corrections on the image pairs as they are displayed, zoomed, panned, and scrolled around. It was implemented in V5.00 by adding to the functionality of the previously introduced geographic locking feature. In stereo viewing the stereo pair of images seem locked together as before but are also altered in relative geometry as you change your viewpoint.

Selecting tie points in V5.00 is not yet a direct part of the direct stereo viewing process. Use the prospective projection step in the stereo to DEM process (Prepare / Raster / Stereo to DEM) to create tie points for the two raster objects. The File / Save ... option in the Correlation Point Selection window saves your tie point list as a subobject. When you select to stereo viewing this saved collection of tie points will be used and stereo fusion and display will proceed automatically. V5.10 will provide a direct means within the stereo viewing process for selecting these tie points (but before stereo fusion is achieved by the relative geometry solutions).

Future Plans. Just the mention of high quality, low-cost stereo viewing and applications has generated a lot of interest and questions with t