PowerMapper Software Blog

The latest quarterly PowerMapper and SortSite maintenance releases are now available.

New features include:

• BlackBerry, Firefox 5 and Chrome 12 added to browser compatibility tests
• Autocomplete for forms
• Enhanced spell checking options

These are available to all customers with active support and maintenance contracts via the Update Watch feature in each application.

One of the great new features in PowerMapper 5 is the ability to overlay data onto a sitemap. Here's an example using data imported from Google Analytics: 

To overlay data from Google Analytics:

1. Go to the Top Content report for your site in Google Analytics
2. Choose the Export option at the top of the page and choose CSV (this exports only the data shown on screen, which is 10 pages by default, so you may want to increases the number of rows displayed)
3. Save the exported file somewhere on your PC
4. Create a map of your site in PowerMapper Professional
5. Select the Import command from the File menu
6. Choose the file you saved at step 3

Note: not all of the map styles support data overlays - try the Electrum or Isometric map styles first

You're not restricted to Google Analytics - any data that can be exported to a CSV file can be overlaid onto a sitemap. This means you can export from other systems (e.g. Google Webmaster Tools) or make up your own spreadsheets of data you want to visualize. The key requirement is the exported data contains a URL in column 1 - this decides which page a row belongs to. The other columns can contain any numerical data (e.g. Hits, PageRank, Number of Inbound Links, Revenue Per Page)

This is just a flavor of what can be done - if you want a compelling way to visually present site data give the downloadable trial a spin today. 

We've just launched PowerMapper 5.0, which will be available to all customers with a support and maintenance contract before the end of the month.

New features in this release include:

• Two new map styles
• Import data from Google analytics or webmaster tools
• Overlay imported data onto site maps (little graphs are drawn next to page thumbnails)
• Add design notes to maps (use this when using the site map as a blueprint for site re-development)
• Extract links from Flash sites
• Resizable page thumbnails
• Support for non-European character sets including Russian, Japanese, Chinese and Korean
• User interface improvements including customizable toolbars and new map wizard
• Exporting meta data
• Support for Windows 7

We'll talk about the new features in more detail in follow-up posts.

Part of the our sales strategy for 2009 is expanding our reseller program. In January we signed up Dell, Compucom and QBS Software.

We're always on the lookout for new resellers, and offer generous discounts for volume sales.

We shipped the latest maintenance release of PowerMapper over the weekend.

The focus of this release was improving performance on large sites. Scanning a large site is now up to 10x faster (depending on network speed). We were aiming for a 2x speed improvement, so we're pretty thrilled.

We also updated Google sitemap export to match the current (0.9) schema from sitemaps.org, and fixed a crash on the Japanese version of Windows XP.

We released PowerMapper 4.12, the latest release of our site mapping tool, a couple of weeks ago, with some long overdue features:

• Export maps as HTML
• Export maps as PNG (useful for using maps in reports/presentations)
• Excel Site Report (useful for information architecture/site redesign)

SortSite 2.04, our link checking and web site testing product was released at the same time and also has a new HTML export option.

We got our test results back from VeriTest this morning - first time pass - PowerMapper is now Certified for Vista.

Apart from the installer, the main bit of engineering work needed to ensure certification was support for Vista Restart Manager. This is one of the best hidden features in Vista - it allows the OS to restart your application where it left off after a reboot or a crash.

Needless to say it needs a bit of work: your app needs to register a command line option used by the Restart Manager via the RegisterApplicationRestart API call.

After that it's up to you: you need to save changes as the user makes them and restore them when the app is restarted using the special command line you registered.

After some hard work we've finally submitted PowerMapper, our site-mapping product, for "Certified for Vista" testing (aka logo testing).

The previous version had gone through the "Designed for XP" test, so we thought it would be easy to get certified for Vista. We were wrong.

The tests themselves are split into three areas:

• Security and Compatibility (test cases 1-10)
  Most desktop apps should pass these tests with few, if any, modifications. The only change we had to make was a modification to the manifest, and remove a 16-bit DLL we used on Win 9x (which we've dropped support for).
• Install / Uninstall (test case 11-29)
  This took a lot of time, since most common setup tools don't produce fully compliant setup packages (even the ones that claim to support Vista). More on this later.
• Reliability (test cases 30-32)
  The only problem was supporting Vista Restart Manager (test case 30). This took a bit of work - apps needs to shutdown and restart within 5 seconds without the user losing any work.

Supporting the install/uninstall requirements was definitely the biggest headache. We've used InstallShield for nearly 10 years for building setups, but the two latest releases just couldn't produce a setup package that passed all the tests.

We eventually threw in the towel after three man-weeks and buying two upgrades: each of which was supposed to provide Vista compliant setups. The closest we got was passing 17 out 18 tests, so it was frustrating to change horses mid-race.

We evaluated a few different products, but the Vista logo requirements ruled out anything that can't produce MSI setup packages. WiX looked promising, but proved to be hard work to get going.

We eventually chose a product called Advanced Installer which costs less than InstallShield, but produced a compliant setup package after half a days work (remember we'd spent three man-weeks on InstallShield at this point). The user interface is quite similar to other setup authoring tools - though a bit more polished than most.

We only had a couple of minor annoyances with Advanced Installer:

• Setting up a file association for document files is error-prone unless you use the File Association wizard: it's easy to produce setups that install but your application's document files don't use the correct icon.
• The setup.exe produced by Advanced Installer 5.2.2 fails one of the App Verifier checks in test case 15. We worked around this by producing an MSI instead. The publishers of the program know about the problem and have promised a fix (they do one or two releases a month so the prospects look good). Now fixed in 6.0.0.
• There is a command line builder for integration with build systems, but if you've a password on your code signing key (and you should!) then it pops up a password dialog for each project being built (which causes problems for unattended or multi-product builds). This is also something they say they're going to look at. Now fixed in 6.0.0.

So that's it for today. We'll find out in a few days if we've passed testing and all the hard work has paid off.

Update: The setup.exe (test case 15) and command line builder issues were fixed in the 6.0.0 release in November 2007.