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Hey fishdude that's pretty cool! I successfully downloaded it at work, it seems to be on a slow server. It took me about 3 minutes to download. One suggestion I'd have for the MSI install - There is no button labeled "Install". As you go through the installshield wizard, you click next to go to each page, however the page that actually begins the install also says Next. People would assume that they could still back up after clicking that, but it would be too late it's already installed. Maybe it's a small thing but I'm trained to look at the small things that's what I do for a living, I'm a software tester at Novell. The program looks pretty cool. I only looked it over for a minute or two but it looks like it could be a great educational tool.
Did you write it in C#?
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Finally, someone that downloaded my software. The core mapping components are written in C++, but the GUIs are written in VB.Net. Thanks for the comments cat_man. I need to make this whole thing as easy as possible so that people will be willing to use the software. I will talk to my installation guy about the Next vs. intall issue.
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Cool! Good luck to you! Let me know if I can help in any other way.
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Nice piece of work! I'm sure you've spent a great deal of time compiling facts and writing the software.
Although I think GIS is always cool, I'm not sure what the utility of the GIS interface is other then populating the drainages with more info like roads, other boundaries, and water features. Other then that the distribution by drainage is exactly the same in the GIS app' as in the distribution map in the Fish Viewer. Do you have point info for each species in each water feature? If so you could include a species in water feature point layer along with the species in drainage polygon layer so users could see which water features within the drainage actually contain the species. With that type of a point layer the points may be too crowded when zoomed out to the layers extent. It may have to be turned off by default and the user could turn it on after they zoomed in to a smaller area.
GIS is also a powerful query tool, but I don't see any query capability in this interface (e.g. show me drainages where Utah Chub AND Leatherside Chub exist).
I will say that it's to bad you had to use the .NET Framework if it was just for the GUI. .NET is a whopper of an install and a bunch of capability for just a GUI. Does the GIS interface use it or just the Fishes Viewer?
As I said to start with, it's a very nice piece of work. Nice images, info, and interface. I sure wish Tomelleri had a painting of a Bonneville Cutthroat from a lake or reservoir instead of that little thing that looks like a fingerling that came from a creek somewhere. And why isn't the Colorado Cutthroat in there? Is it lumped in with the Bonneville or Yellowstone in the classification system you used?
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BTW - Nice manual. Well done.
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RipNLips - thanks for the feedback. Your ideas about queries are great. We struggled a little with how much functionality to include in the software, since it we were designing it for 4th and 9th graders. I would like to have included much more information and functionality, but I was working on a very limited budget.
As for the GIS software, it is a stand alone software that we have developed for use on various research projects that we are working on. We developed the Native Fishes Viewer as a custom plug-in for this software. The .Net framework supports the GUIs and all of the plugin architecture for the GIS software, only a small amount of which is used by this particular project.
As for the Colorado Cutthroat - I don't believe that it was included in the reference that we used to document the native species of Utah. I will have to go back and make sure that I didn't screw things up
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I believe there are 14 or 15 recognized subspecies of Oncorhynchus clarki, one of which is recognized as O. c. pleuriticus or "Colorado River Cutthroat" which is found in only the Green and Colorado River drainages. You've got the other two in Utah which are O. c. bouvieri or "Yellowstone Cutthroat" (historic range barely makes it into Utah apparently) and O. c. utah or "Bonneville Cutthroat". It's currently believed that the Colorado River Cutthroat's historic range included the Green and Colorado River drainages of eastern Utah.
Heres a link to a petition to list the Colorado River Cutthroat as threatened or endangered that has a bunch of info concerning it's taxonomy and historic distribution ([url "http://www.biologicaldiversity.org/swcbd/papers/CRCTintro.html"]http://www.biologicaldiversity.org/...apers/CRCTintro.html[/url]). As a side note, the Fed' decided not to list it in April, 2004.
If I recall correctly, there's currently a push to remove some/all (who knows?) Bonneville and Yellowstone Cutthroat from the historic range of the Colorado River Cutthroat in Utah and replace them with Colorado River Cutthroat. Several populations believed to be "pure" have been discovered within recent years and hatcheries have apparently been actively producing them since 1999. Here's a [url "http://dwrcdc.nr.utah.gov/rsgis2/Search/Display.asp?FlNm=oncoclpl"]link[/url] briefly describing Utah's efforts to reestablish the Colorado River Cutthroat in it's historic range.
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