Bit Map FREE on the App Store on 1st Day of Each Month

[Son of a Beach]

Bit Map is an advanced mapping, navigation and GIS app which can use a vast array of online and offline spatial data services and formats (for Apple devices).

For the next several months - on the first day of each month - Bit Map is available from the App Store for FREE !!!

GET IT FROM THE APP STORE HERE

The new generation Bit Map has reached some level of maturity in terms of both features and bugs, and so the 'Lite' version of Bit Map (free, but with limitations) is going to be retired soon. To help people transition from the 'Lite' version, the standard version will be available for free from the App Store of the first day of each month (until at least the end of this year, and probably well into next year). Whether you have used the 'Lite' version or not, you are now in on the secret and can get the standard version of Bit Map for free on the 1st day of each month.

For more information, the Bit Map home page is at http://nixanz.com/bitmap/ and says stuff like:

Bit Map is the original custom map navigation app, being first to provide navigation with arbitrary offline maps in 2009.

Rebuilt from scratch for version 7, Bit Map now supports a variety of online vector and raster map services including WFS, WMTS, TMS and XYZ/OSM-compatible services, as well as several offline vector and raster data formats such as GeoPackage, Shapefile, File Geodatabase (read-only), GPX and KML.

Map images can be imported and used as map layers with 4 methods of georeferencing available. Existing georeferencing will be automatically used for some image types.

Bit Map can even produce beautiful web maps that are easy to use and automatically synchronise layers from your device to the web map after the layers are updated!

Bit Map is built on a true GIS foundation and can manage data in hundreds of different coordinate systems, projections and geographic datums. Layers with different projections can be displayed simultaneously in the same map.

And the even better news (at least for me):

File geodatabases will no longer be read-only in the next major release of Bit Map. Yep, you will be able to create and update file geodatabases all within Bit Map. I've been wanting this for about 10 years, since my GIS tutor told us, "File geodatabes are a proprietary format and only ESRI software can use them", and then I showed him an early version of my app which could read the file geodatabases we were working on in the tutorial (but not write to them). Turns out nobody likes a smart-ass.

Even if you don't want to use Bit Map now, download it for free while you can and then delete it. That way, if you do wish to use it in the future, you will not be charged for it again later on, when it is no longer available for free.

[peregrinator]

(for iPhone and iPad users only...)

Thanks for the offer, but I overlooked the phrase above until after I'd downloaded the app. Which I did, because when I checked it out in the App Store link, it was clearly stated that it "requires macOS 11.3 or later and a Mac with Apple M1 chip or later". So which statement is true?

Incidentally, trying to download it in Firefox does not work. Safari does.

[Son of a Beach]

(for iPhone and iPad users only...)

Thanks for the offer, but I overlooked the phrase above until after I'd downloaded the app. Which I did, because when I checked it out in the App Store link, it was clearly stated that it "requires macOS 11.3 or later and a Mac with Apple M1 chip or later". So which statement is true?

Incidentally, trying to download it in Firefox does not work. Safari does.

In theory, it should also run on macOS with an Apple CPU (ie, not on older Intel Macs). I don't specifically advertise this, because my own Mac is a very old Intel Mac, so I can't test it running on a Mac. So it should work - but will look like an iPad app, rather than a Mac app. Apple allows any iPad app to run on macOS (with Apple CPU), unless the developer specifically configures their app store record to prevent it.

If you give it a try, I'd be very interested to hear how it goes. It should be available in the Mac App Store, I think, using the 'App Store' app on macOS (with Apple CPU).

(My initial iPhone/iPad only statement, was really to let people know that it's not available for Android or other phone/tablet varieties. I've updated that line to "Apple devices" now.)

[Son of a Beach]

Finally got a chance to test Bit Map on macOS on a borrowed Apple Silicon Mac.

It seems to work fine, which is a relief.

It is clearly an iPad app rather than a Mac app, but it works as expected. Of course you can’t display your location on the Mac.

Eventually I may look into working towards making it a bit more Mac friendly (menus, toolbars, etc). But that would be a long term thing. I’ve done it for another much simpler app and it worked OK.