Normally, at this time of year on the B.C. coast, most field engineers are looking forward to spending some quality time in the warm dry office. This year is different. After a long dry summer with unprecedented wild fires, the warm weather lingers on into October. Today the temperature is expected to reach 26° C (79° F). I’m sure we’ll pay for this good weather in November and December.

Since we released Version 4 in July sales have been strong and the feedback we have had from customers has been very positive. Some of the most popular features are reading and writing shape files, large coordinates, survey adjustments and the new culvert editor.

We are now offering both forestry and civil RoadEng® products. The Forest Engineer product contains functions relevant for planning forest operations and resource roads. The Civil Engineer product includes functions for designing public roads according to AASHTO standards. Although the line between civil and forest engineering is often fuzzy, we believe that by dividing the product into the two disciplines we can better focus its application while retaining its friendly interface.

We are also encouraged by the compliments we have had for Terrain Tools® from a wide range of industries. Terrain Tools has proven that it will work well as either a standalone program or in harmony with other industry standards such as ArcView®.

The future is "full speed ahead". We plan to continue developing and enhancing our products to serve all our customers.

Craig Speirs
President

This fall and winter we will be running courses in RoadEng and Terrain Tools. Courses will be tailored to the expertise and specific interests of the group. 

...Click here for more information.

Small Is Beautiful

Q: How Big is Softree?

A: Small! ……Just 5 employees. We are small because that's the best way to be fast, responsive and flexible. We believe passionately in small companies; unencumbered by large overheads, corporate inertia or layers of administration.

Today, small talented companies can produce top quality products. Having worked in both very small companies and enormous multinationals we believe that small companies are simply better. The quality of the response is better, the relationships more productive, the service more personal.

Did You Know?

If you don’t have a mouse wheel you’re missing out on a nifty feature. In V4 it is possible to zoom by simply scrolling the mouse wheel. Similarly, holding down the mouse wheel button and moving the mouse causes the window to pan.

Version 4 allows you to calculate volumes in two ways "mid point to mid point" or "station to station" in the Location module. See Location menu Module | Setup | Alignment.

Maintenance Upgrade

Free maintenance upgrades for Version 4 are available on our web site. In addition to bug corrections, the following enhancements have been added since the first Version 4 release.

This example demonstrates how to calculate the surface properties such as area, enclosed volume, average slope and aspect. To do this we will superimpose a 2D polygonal feature on a TIN model and enable its "Surf./Vol."property. This will cause the surface properties to be calculated during the Terrain model calculation. 

..... Click here for more information.

Support For Ethiopia

Softree is proud to contribute engineering software to the South Rural Road Authority (SRRA) in Awassa Ethiopia. Through Softree’s assistance, SRRA will be able to work more efficiently and accurately, and also keep up with modern Western engineering tools.

SSRA staff in Awassa Ethiopia

Thank You Beta Testers

We would like to thank all the beta testers for their excellent feedback and assistance in testing and improving our software. A special thank you is due to Les Higgs of the B.C. MOF, Greg Zartman of the team at LEI, and Dave Keely formerly of Landmark.

Beta testing can be very frustrating especially in the early stages of development. We greatly appreciate all the help that was provided.

Web Training

Do you need a little help applying the program to a specific project? Web based training may be the answer.

Web based training is a live on-line presentation with visual display over the Internet and voice narration using a telephone connection. Pre-packaged courses are available or custom courses using your own data to solve a specific problem are also available. The cost is $100 (CDN) / hour. Note this service requires that you have a broadband internet connection (such as Cable or DSL).

Why Upgrade to Version 4?

Click here for information about Version 4.