UglyBass Utilities Tutorial

This is a mini tutorial setup to show you just how to use the new UglyBass Utilities. So far we have spent our development time on making the application better, so we did not have time to write a complete help system yet. But we think with a little walk thru that most of your questions will be answered!!

Installation

Basically to installl the program you need to have a Zip program, such as Winzip. Just use this utility to extract the program to its own directory on your hard drive and it is ready to go.

First Run

Here we go.. Click on the Application to run the program. UglyBass Utilities will come up, with a disclaimer showing you information about the program. Click Ok. You now see the main application. Its layout is quite simple. The main View is for the Maps you will create or modify. To the right are three windows, one reminding you where this great program came from, one showing you Sunrise and Sunset information , and one for Point information.. Along the bottom on the Status bar you will notice positions of your mouse cursor in Latitude and Longitude, and in x/y. There is also a standard toolbar with most of the main features of the program just a click away, and above that the menu bar where the rest of the features reside.

The Toolbar

The first three buttons on the menu are pretty standard. Open a Location, Save a Location and Print. We won't elaborate on these as we hope you have used applications that use this same format.

Next you will find a button that appears to be a pushpin. This represents User Information Points, the main way for you to mark locations on a map. Go ahead and push this button. You should see a Blue pushpin appear in the upper left of your map area..
Now go to this point and drag it(click on it and hold the left mouse button down while moving the mouse to a new location). See how easy that is!
Now right click on this point. You will see a menu. On the menu choose Setup. You can now choose a different icon for this point from the top list simply by highlighting a new one, and you can assign a name and text to this point as well. You may also change the Lat/Lon of this point, but we suggest you don't do this at this time, as we have not configured that part of the program yet!! Go ahead and click ok. You have now configured your first point, if you leave the mouse pointer over this point on the map, it should show you a tooltip with the name of the point that you just entered.

Modes

The next 6 buttons on the toolbar are the MODE buttons. They determine what mode you are in. You can tell what mode you are in by which button is depressed and from your cursor.

The first mode is standard mode. This is the default choice and allows you to click on points to see information on it. If it isn't selected choose this mode, and then double-click on the user point you just created. You should see that the Point Information Window on the right of the screen just filled with information regarding this point.

The next mode is the magnifying glass. It allows you to zoom in on locations on the map, just as a magnifying glass would. Go ahead and select this mode. Now click anywhere on the screen with this tool and hold the left mouse button. You will see a magnified view come up. Move around while still holding the button to keep the view up. You can Configure the power, shape and size of this tool by right clicking or by using a menu choice.

The Pan mode is next. It basically allows you to click and drag a spot around the screen. Try it and you'll see. Think of it as grabbing the map to move it.

Next we have the Ruler. Although we don't have this part of it configured, go ahead and try it anyway. Just click on a spot you want to start measuring from, then move to the spot you want to measure to, and click, and then move to the next spot. If you want to quit the current measure, double click, otherwise it will keep totalling the distance between multiple points, as represented by the yellow line. Kinda neat, huh?? I'll show you how we make this accurate in one moment.

The next mode is quite important, the Coordinate Setup Mode. It is one of two ways you can setup the map. For right now let's just assume that you can picture where it is your looking(there may be a picture in the view in a moment to help you). Choose this mode. Now click somewhere near the upper left corner. The point you just clicked will now be assigned the Lat/Lon you enter. Try putting in a Latitude of 45-30-0 and Longitude of 90-15-0. Now hit Ok. Now click somewhere near the lower right. Now put in 46-00-0 and 91-15-0. You have now "geocoded" your map(or in our case, white area). This is what the latitude and Longitude in your User points and the ruler measurements are based off of. So if you knew based off your GPS where the point is by a Lat/Lon, you could enter a Lat/lon in the User Point dialog we visited earlier, and it would go to the right place.
The first point is also the location the Sunrise/Sunset Calculator uses. You should now see the times filled in for sunrise and sunset. These times are base on wherever in the world the first lat/lon is. Pretty simple, huh?!
These points that are used to geocode will eventually be known points that you obtain either from your GPS or from other sources.

The final Mode is the Drawing mode. Go ahead and click on the pen. Notice that the 6 final buttons now become active. The first four of these new buttons allow you to chose what type of drawing you want to do. Go ahead and experiment. A little hint, the line drawing works the same as the ruler, so double-click when your done.

Ok, now that you've drawn something, the last two buttons are to erase. The first one will let you clear all the drawing(redlining as it is sometimes called) off of your map. The last button is the undo. It will erase the last thing you did. It remembers everything you did in this session so will keep deleting in order of what was drawn.

Finally, Drawing has a setup dialog under the setup menu, which will allow you to change the line thickness and pen colors for more flexibility with your drawing. Go try that out to see.

Loading Maps

Ok, now for the most important part. I hope your comfortable. Choose file open, either from the toolbar or menu. Now at the bottom you can see a "files of type" drop down. Well when you are starting a new map area for the first time, you should change this to either a jpg or bmp depending on what you have. Why? Because you can put a map up in these formats to map over the top of. You can use any maps of this format, whether you scan them in or get them off the web.

One GREAT Example:

1. Go to Terraserver.Microsoft.com.
2. Use the "find box" to find a specific place. Out of the list they give, choose one of the topo(or other) maps.
3. You should see a map of the area you want. Choose Image Size LARGE from the top. This will give you a bigger map to work with.
4. Go to "Image Info" in upper left. You will see the Latitude/Longitudes of the image. Write down the upper left and lower right.
5. Go Back. Now go to "download" on the upper right. Once there, click on the image.
6. Once the image is constructed, follow the directions to save this picture to your computer. You may want to save it to your UglyBass Utility Directory or a directory specifically for your images.
7.Now use the Open file in UglyBass Utilities, and choose file type Jpg, and find the file you just downloaded.
8. Open it. You should now see it in your view.
9. Now one last thing, remember those Lat/Lons you wrote down off the site. well use the x/y coordinate setup mode to click on the very upper left and very lower right of the map and set these points to those coordinates.
10. Its always good when starting a new location, that at this point you hit save. It will then save this information to a UBM file, which will know those lat/lons, where the file is, and any drawing points that you have!!
11. Now Map Away!!

Other Features

Fish Calculator: This is located under the tools menu, and will allow you to calculate a rough estimation of what weight your fish was.

Map Points: Map points are points that you don't want to go away. They are represented by small colored boxes, and represent permanent landmarks on maps. Usually they get setup when you are first setting up a location.

Layers: The layer dialog allows you to choose what actually gets drawn. Say you want to look at your map without all your drawings. Go into this box and turn off what you don't want to see. It won't draw them on your map anymore. They're still there, they just aren't visible.

Coord Setup Dialog: This is just another way to do what the x/y Coord Setup mode does.

Delete User Points: Just go in here and put a check next to any User Info Points that you want to remove. Hit Ok, and they are gone!!!

Configuration Choices: Just a few more choices for you to make the program feel more comfortable. The first one allows you to automatically on startup open whatever map you had open the last time you were in the program. The other two are just for the turning off the crosshair cursor, and the x,y displayed on the status bar. No reason to know the x,y unless you are setting up the Coordinate system.

And finally, this thing is written so that it is very customizeable. You can create your own toolbars, move the docking windows around, and even have it run other applications. A lot of this functionality is under the toolbar/customize choice in the menu. It can be very handy!!

Well that's it!! You are now an UglyBass Utilities Expert. Let me know what you think, and if you would be interested in a more advanced program, so you can do things like: tile multiple map images together, interact with your GPS, draw routes, etc.... Good Luck!!