mixed news on the new SwissTopo products, not bad value if you’re not an existing user, however, if you are then you’ve just been majorly screwed over :

http://swissmountainleader.com/wp/2011/05/10/lost-in-switzerland-for-want-a-decent-map/

Yes it is pretty annoying when you have invested 1000CHF in a dead end. I agree about the online side of things, especially when you may not even be able to get a GSM signal in a lot of areas. This is somewhere where they should probably work with the open source community to develop the software then, as they do, charge a subscription for map access.

Normally one would expect better from the Swiss, the Swiss Swizz you could call it.

you can imagine how the meetings went .... “we’re putting it in the cloud” ..... that will have played well up the management chain.

the situation with Swiss Map 50 is very poor, this is a fairly new product released in 2009 costing 500 chf albeit using a toolset for a hardware platform that Apple haven’t shipped since 2006. It’s the Swiss Map 50 that corresponds to the blue ski tour maps.

It really confirms what I’ve thought for a while, government mapping agencies really shouldn’t be in the software business. If they wanted to spend their time and my money and my tax, more usefully I’d suggest they pursue some international standards for mapping data so we can buy the data anywhere and buy a mapping product that works and use the same data, that we paid for already, on our GPS units.

This really, really sucks. They’ve extracted money for the same data from me 7 times now (*) and are offering me an 8 chf discount on the next bit of racketeering. It looks a reasonable deal if you’re a new user but I’d not get too carried away, their track record of delivering software that works reliably is pretty abysmal.

* 7 times
1. original SwissTopo GPS for Garmin
2. version 2 (with routing) SwissTopo for Garmin
3. 1:25k paper maps
4. 1:50k paper maps (yellow)
5. 1:50k paper maps (blue, ski tour)
6. Swiss Map 25
7. Swiss Map 50

I may be naive on this but why not stick 2 fingers up at Swiss Topo and print your maps for free, from Geoportail by selecting the “Cartes-pixel Swisstopo” format?
Navigation charts have been similarly expensive and as new versions are launched you can be left with the obsolete ones and no economical update path - there are several companies selling their version of these, which does introduce an element of competition.
Ordnance Survey currently have a special offer on for their “Getamap” system, that allows unlimited A4 prints for an annual subscription of £18 - obviously only useful for the UK.

good question, I was under the impression that geoportail was an IGN project with coverage for France plus doms, is that not so?

I also understand Geoportail is an IGN project, I guess in true Gallic style, to counter Google Earth. It covers the World in small scale and currently Spain and Switzerland in large scale. Just switch on and off the “Carte” options on the left of the screen to access. I have been unable to search by place name, therefore it tends to be a bit laborious to find places just by scrolling over the map.

I’m travelling but I’ll try that sometime when I get a moment.

I think the French Government had a project to make a Google Earth competitor or am I confusing that with the search engine project?

There is a 3D interface for geoportail I think.

I think you are spot on, I believe that Geoportail has been developed to compete with Google Earth but then mostly just for France and it’s dependancies.
The 3D version has been in beta for years but is excellent - far better than Google Earth in as much that you can overlay a large scale map over the aerial photos and adjust the opacity.
The 3D version does not contain maps or aerial photos of Switzerland or Spain.