Key Benefits

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Imagine that your company wants to write an app for iOS, Android and Windows 8 devices. You have two big problems.

First, the native mapping APIs on the three devices are all completely different and have different capabilities. Your developers have to learn all three APIs, and capabilities that may be available in one are not necessarily available in the others. This incompatibility can force work-arounds and compromises that can be extremely uncomfortable and push back schedules.

Second, you often have no control over the base maps on the three different platforms, meaning that your apps look different on different devices. Google maps, Apple maps and Bing maps can look very different and often contain artifacts that you do not want in your app.

What if you could have a single mapping engine that spans all three mobile platforms, along with Windows 8 desktop, OSX desktop and Linux? The BA3 Altus Mapping Engine^™ is such an engine — it runs on every major OS platform and provides identical capabilities on all of them. Altus can do this because the same high-performance engine code is running identically on every platform.

The BA3 Altus Mapping Engine^™ also gives you complete control over your base layers, meaning that your apps look identical on all the different platforms. For your base layer you can choose from any of the following:

1. Any tile provider, like MapBox, MapQuest or custom tiles streaming in from the Internet
2. MBTiles files on device or streaming in
3. Any raster assets, like FAA charts, geoTiffs, getPDFs, aerial photos, etc., either on device or streaming
4. Terrain layers on device or streaming
5. Vector base layers derived from OpenStreetMap, Natural Earth, Esri shape files or custom vector data sources

And the capabilities of BA3's common mapping code base are amazing compared to native APIs. Create high performance, fluid marker layers with up to a million markers. Create custom vector and polygon layers. Overlay satellite and radar data. Change alpha channels to configure layer over layer with transparency. Use track up and track forward with ease. Overlay custom data sources easily. Etc.

The layering abilities of Altus are also amazing, especially on mobile devices. Bring in a tiled base layer. Overlay it with raster images. Overlay that with 100,000 markers. Add in a polygon layer. Then overlay radar data on top of it. This kind of layering is impossible with native APIs. With the BA3 Altus Mapping Engine^™ it all works and it provides a smooth, fluid, intuitive and impressive user interface for your users.

Your data can be local to the device, or it can stream in over the Internet, or it can switch between the two modes seamlessly. Some apps using the BA3 Altus Mapping Engine^™ have 1 gigabyte or 10 gigabytes of data on the device and never connect to the Internet. Some apps have zero data on device and stream everything in. Some use a combination. It's your choice with the BA3 Altus Mapping Engine^™.

Do you prefer to use compact, high performance vector files? The BA3 Altus Mapping Engine^™ is the first engine with a high-performance vector capability built in. Bring in massive amounts of vector data from OpenStreetMap, Natural Earth, Esri shape files or custom vector data sources. Manipulate and select the data you need using BA3's MapShop tool. Then style your data with MapShop and export a compact vector file. Place this file on your server to stream it, or on the device to have local access without the need for an Internet connection.

No other mapping engine on the planet offers this combination of capabilities, performance, customization and usability on all major platforms. Contact BA3 today.