iMap 3.0 is a program that allows cartographers and designers to create maps with information imported from a tab-delimited text file. iMap is a great tool for Keynote users, cartographers, atlas designers, and marketing people.

iMap’s interface is daunting: it’s a white area with very few buttons and menus to choose from. The white area reminded me of a blank sheet of paper; equally dreadful. iMap comes with a help file and PDF documentation is available on the web, but to be quite frank, it’s below par. The developers clearly believe that their product is simple enough to understand with even the slightest knowledge about getting data into the application. Obviously they should position themselves in the shoes of the average user and re-think their documentation from there.

That being said, once you get the idea behind the whole concept, it is deceivable simple. I spent a few hours with iMap and after much trial and error, was finally able to create an information map in seconds. Here’s how it is done.

First you look up a vector map (Arc/Info file) on the Web. For my example, I downloaded a map of the UK. Once that file is on your system, you can simply import it by clicking on the map button. This immediately creates your map in the white area. If you want a satellite photo or some colourful image as map, you can have that as well, but an image map requires an extra step, called calibration.

Now you have your map, it’s time to get some data on it. Let’s say you wanted to show the ratio between races in a city. This requires you to get the latitude and longitude of the city, its different population figures and a means to display those figures in diagram format. In iMap, the lat/lon of a city can easily be found by looking it up from within the application. iMap simply connects to the Internet and downloads all cities with the name you’ve entered. All you have to do is choose the right one. In our example, however ---and this is what took me some time to work out as the manual stays silent--- we want to show a ratio between African, Asian and Caucasian inhabitants associated with each city, and a simple lat/lon position will not reveal those figures.

The method to get those figures in iMap is by importing a tab-delimited file containing the cities, their location on the globe, and the figures we want to show. To the makers of iMap this is crystal clear, as they must have assumed scientists or other data collectors are the first market for their application. But if you’re a designer and you want to be able to design an information-rich map for a brochure or presentation, you are bound to work the other way round: from design to data.

So, with iMap, you first create your tab-delimited text file. The easiest to do that is by using Microsoft Excel and setting up columns with the necessary data. Then you save the data as tab-delimited text file and import this file into iMap. iMap is capable enough to ask you a few relevant questions as you import such a file, after which your cities will be loaded in iMap’s Fields column. The Fields column should have been called Records column, because it really contains records, with each record containing the data fields imported earlier.
An extra feature of iMap is that it’s capable of importing US ZIP-codes and locate them in the right spot automatically.

To show those cities that you want to show on the map, you select the cities from the Fields column. Each record has its own data sheet, containing the field data in the tab-delimited file. These fields can now be edited in iMap. For each record you can show fields in various ways, such as pie chart, bar graph, track (distance between locations), or simply symbol (which does not require extra data except the lat/lon data). Because each record can be formatted on the map independently, you can show a highly populated city with a much bigger pie chart than a village.

While iMap’s formatting features are already nicely done, I found them to be a little thin. For example, why can’t I change fonts, why can’t you “paint” a vector map, or have more control over where text is positioned in relation to the graph or symbol? Another map creation tool comes to mind, which does allow all these things: Avenza MAPublisher.

MAPublisher is an Illustrator plug-in, and it does allow you to do all those things, but at the cost of a much more complicated and time-consuming interface and concept. If the accurate, colourful and data-rich maps that you can create with iMap are what you’re after, then MAPublisher simply is overkill. If you want to create maps with much detail on a small scale, such as is required for road maps, then MAPublisher is a better choice.