Mikerowaved wrote:I've used MS S&T for several years and find it can be very useful as a stand-alone product, but with no API support it's a brick for programmers. (I guess MS wanted to save that feature for their more expensive MapPoint product.)
My needs would involve importing multiple sets of names and addresses already geocoded, and a robust facility for printing these plotted maps at various zoom levels, along with an itemized legend. I couldn't find anything in the MS marketing stuff leading me to believe S&T would do this, so I bought a trial copy of the DeLorme product, which might be forced to do much of it.
I will keep it, but with reservations. It has a lot of functionality, but the interface is complex, non-intuitive, inconsistent and downright maddening. There is no API. As a niche product it does have some loyal power users adept at inventing workarounds. Some of DeLorme's hard-copy maps look quite good -- including a 36" X 48" wall map I made for our missionaries. I don't like its proprietary file formats. But any company that has built The World's Largest Globemust know something about geography.
Neither company's product is very expensive, considering.
For APIs, some of the best tools seem to be web-based, with Google, Yahoo and Microsoft competing in the same space. But licensing is a jungle. You can do a lot for free, but soon you run into somebody's pay-to-play business model, which gets expensive fast.