Hope my following answer can give you some help. 1) I can based on Map Suite Destkop Edition, we have the ability to do the text annotation, and this item seems already is in our working list. code.thinkgeo.com/issues/show/13
2) We can create heat map as long as the data in based on grid instead of Triangle. We have a HowDoI sample showing how to do this. HowDoIsamples\Data providers\ LoadAGridFeatureLayer
Any more questions please feel free to let me know. Thanks.
I can help you with this. The first is the annotation part and this can be accomplished by our track shape system. You can create track shapes like boxes, points etc and label them. There is also a freehand track type so you can draw odd shaped stuff. You will need to store the results somewhere though. You can if you like store them to a shape file or Access database etc. There isn’t an out of the box example but if you provide some more detail we could try whipping one up for you.
For the heat maps I did a little research and you should be able to accomplish this using our GridStyle. The grid style uses a grid of cells that each have a number. The numbers can be color coded to represent the various colors and temperatures. If you have sparse data points there are also algorithms that can interpolate the data in between. There are a number of different methods to do that. I have a link to an article showing how to do it in our Map Suite 2.x product. This article is old but the 3.x product can do the same thing but with slightly different classes. I want to show this to you to see if this is something like what you needed. Also scan to the bottom as there is a nice screen shot of using the gradients to make a nice smooth image.
Thanks for your replies. I checked out the sample LoadAGridFeaturelayer and noticed an existing PhValues.grd file being used. I have a follow up question about the grid file (.grd).
Do I need to create my own grid file to be able to use heat maps over the base map layer? If yes, how do I create/view a grid file?
Here is another like that I think explains it a bit better and has pictures as well. What kind of data do you have, can you describe it? Is the data in decimal degrees or some other unit like feet or meters? Is the data tied to the ground, meaning do you have spatial coordinates for some of the items? If you supply a sample we can try and help put something together for you to try.
We are about to release a new style for heat maps. The new style renders really fast and in realtime and is much better for visualizations than the grid method above. I just wanted to refresh this thread and let you know it is coming. We will also have some samples on the code.thinkgeo.com in the coming days.