General
Walter Maps is a professional tool for online and fully offline geodata collection and editing. You can use it stand alone or as a ready-to-use field data collection tool in your existing geodata environment. Walter Maps is available for all major mobile platforms. Walter Map has an intuitive user interface for cost effective field data collection and with its fully open data formats you can interchange geodata with any people and with almost any geodata solution or system. Walter maps comes in two flavours, Walter Maps Free and Walter Maps Pro. Walter Maps Free contains some editing features, and could be regarded as a reader app for geodata and maps produced by Walter Maps Pro. The target audience for Walter Maps Pro is professional users collecting geodata and producing maps. In any case, try Walter Maps Free before you decide to use the more advanced Walter Maps Pro for your projects. Within Walter Maps Free, you have the possibility to purchase a monthly unlock of the professional features in Walter Maps Pro, i.e. you only pay for Pro features when you need them. Walter Maps Free and Walter Maps Pro contain the following basic features: Walter Maps Pro contains the following additional professional features:What is Walter Maps?
Walter Maps is designed and developed for professionals by professionals. Our goals for designing Walter Maps are:What are the design goals of Walter Maps?
The primary target audience for Walter Maps is professional users like urban or landscape planners, engineers, surveyors, prospectors, foresters, environmentalists, researchers, farmers, investigators, military personell etc, having a need for an effective and offline geodata collection tool. Semi-professional users and non-professional users might also find Walter Maps useful for viewing, collection and even playing with geodata. Depending on your needs, you can choose between the Free and Pro version of Walter Maps. If you are a professional or a semi-professional user and don´t work with geodata on a regular basis, the PPM version (Pro Per Month) might be ideal for you. Who is the primary user of Walter Maps?
Walter Maps is compatible with almost all mid-range to high-end smart phones, tablets and computers running iOS, Android or Windows 10. Entry level devices might also work, depending on their memory size and configuration. Your device should have at least 1 Gbyte of RAM in order to work with Walter Maps. The best way to test if your device is compatible is to install the Free version of Walter Maps. If the Free version is working, the Walter Maps Pro version will also work on your device. For Windows 10 computers (notebooks or stationary), a touch screen is required for full functionality.In order to make Walter Maps to work with low-end devices you could try to set the screen resolution to “low”, found in the settings menu of Walter Maps. Is Walter Maps compatible with my device?
Walter Maps works on Apple iOS (iPhone and iPad), Android (from version 4.4 KitKat), Windows 10 mobile (both ARM and X86 processors), and Windows 10 desktop. These versions are available from their stores respectively.Which platforms does Walter Maps support?
Walter Maps supports English and Swedish off the shelf. If you want to get support for other languages, you can create your own language files as described in the Manual section above.Which languages does Walter Maps support?
Usage
Walter Maps supports ESRI Shape-files, Tiff (with tfw-world-files), GeoTiff, JPEG (with jgw-world-files), and WMS/WMTS-services. For ESRI Shape-files attributes for integers, floating point numbers, and strings can be viewed and edited. In Walter Maps Pro you are able to create your own point, line, or polygon shape-files. The following color formats and data types are supported by the raster formats:Which data formats do Walter Maps support?
You can always use the free version of Walter Maps to view other people’s data. All data collected with Walter Maps use open data standards, therefore you can also use software like the commercial ESRI ArcGIS (http://www.esri.com) and the open source QGIS (http://www.qgis.org) for viewing and editing of your collected data.How do you view other people´s data?
The easiest way is to share your data through Dropbox (http://www.dropbox.com). You can also share by e-mail or by making your data available by download from ordinary web-addresses. For the latter case you have the possibility to password-protect your data (works only in Walter Maps Pro)How do I share my data with others?
All your data are locally stored on your device. Your original data, copied from your dropbox or your device shared storage (only applicable to Android devices), will be left untouched, serving as an original backup of your data. When editing your data (i.e. adding new data to your map, or editing geometries or attributes) your data are always instantly saved locally onto your device. When you have finished working with you data, you send the data to dropbox, by e-mail or to your device shared storage (only applicable to Android devices). Your sent data are compressed into a zip-file named with present time and date, making the zip-file a backup of your data in itself. In Walter Maps Pro you have the possibility to make local backups of your vector data and for geometry edits you can do a single step undo.Where are my data stored when I'm working with Walter Maps?
Walter Maps provides Open Street Map (http://www.openstreetmap.org) data out of the box as a web map service. You can use it online in all versions of Walter Maps and off-line in Walter Maps Pro. Does Walter Maps provide any geographic data from start?
Certainly, you can use your built in GPS reciever for orientation and collection of tracks and waypoints. If you require high coordinate precision, you might want to use high end equipment, e.g. devices from handheld group or Panasonic. For consumer grade devices you might want to consider external GPS recievers from Dual, Bad Elf or Garmin, in order to improve coordinate precision. If you need even higher coordinate precision you should consider using an external Differential GPS receiver.Can I use the device GPS-receiver to collect data in Walter Maps?
In Walter Maps Free the following geometry editing is supported:Which geometry editing is supported in Walter Maps Free?
For boosting viewing and editing performance you can consider to:Which performance considerations shall I take when working with Walter Maps?
Walter Maps supports a wide range of projected coordinate systems (X and Y coordinates). The first time you use Walter Maps, you ought to select the coordinate system you are using. You can of course change your projected coordinate system at any time. If you haven´t selected any projected coordinate system and you are adding a map layer containing information about a projected coordinate system, Walter Maps will select that as your presently chosen coordinate system. You should be aware of the following:Which coordinate systems does Walter Maps support?
Advanced usage
Yes, in Walter Maps Pro you can build your own forms by setting up data validation through user-specified ranges, sets, or regular expressions. Please look for more information in the Manual section above. This means that you as a user will:Can I build my own data collection forms in Walter Maps?
In Walter Maps Pro the following geometry editing is supported:Which geometry editing is supported in Walter Maps Pro?
Troubleshooting
In order not to interrupt recording of tracks, Walter Maps must be in focus during the recording time. On Android and iOS devices, Walter Maps automatically prevents the screen from getting locked while using the app. On Windows 10 phone devices you have to configure this manually. On most Windows 10 phones the maximum time until the screen gets locked is 5 minutes. In order to extend that to 30 minutes or forever you have to follow the steps descibed in the following link. Follow the answer beginning with “As a matter of fact you can set the timeout to be never”.How do i prevent my screen from getting locked on my Windows 10 phone?