The following represents an interview with conducted via e-mail by TatukGIS with Rory Groves (www.swiftwx.com) on April 7, 2003, following the March 31 commercial release of the SWIFT WX v2, an advanced, real-time severe weather tracking application created from the TatukGIS DK-ActiveX. Rory is located in Minneapolis, Minnesota and has been a DK licensed user since the beginning of February, 2003.
TatukGIS: Rory, you have kept us in the dark about your application for the last couple of months, but now that your product has been commercially released, I hope that you can share with us exactly what the application that you have created from the TatukGIS DK really does.
Rory Groves: SwiftWX is an advanced, real-time severe weather tracking tool. This latest version built on the TatukGIS DK ties in storm data from all major weather sources into a single application: radar, satellite, watches, warnings, convective outlooks, mesoscale (small-scale) outlooks, surface observations, and storm-level attributes such as direction, intensity and speed. With the use of any fixed-line or mobile internet connection, SwiftWX allows the user to see real-time weather information from these multiple sources, while also tracking the user's position with via the connection of any standard GPS device. The product specifications are available from the www.swiftwx.com web site, along with a 14-day free trial download.
TatukGIS: Who is your target market for this application?
Rory Groves: The primary market is Storm Chasers, Storm Spotters, and Emergency Management. Secondary markets include Aviators, Mariners, and other ground-based transports
TatukGIS: Naturally e are very interested in why you selected the TatukGIS DK toolkit for the development of your application. Did you consider any other GIS software vendors besides TatukGIS?
Rory Groves: We mainly selected the DK because of the quality of support we received during our technical evaluation. TatukGIS far exceeded all other vendors when it came to support. Furthermore, the DK itself was the only component on the market that met all of my requirements, particularly dealing with transparent overlays and raster graphics. We also evaluated the MapObjects and MapX toolkit products.
TatukGIS: Is there anything that you might like to add about your experience with the DK. We recognize that the DK documentation is still weaker than it should be, so do not pull any punches. We welcome even negative feedback
Rory Groves: We were very pleased to discover how powerful the DK engine was. Whenever we encountered an obstacle, it didn't take long for the TatukGIS support staff to offer a solution. Since we are relatively inexperienced in the GIS world, we probably had more to learn than many of your customers. It would have been nice to have more background on the different features in the documentation, but overall we are very impressed.