For years, fire departments have used First Look Pro to organize and access all their critical pre-incident planning information. But that information is not very helpful until you first find your way to the incident! Now you can use First Look Pro Map, with its GPS technology, to show you how to get there and display the progress of your vehicle as you move towards the incident.
First Look Pro Map lets you take advantage of the ESRI map data that is commonly available from county and city GIS departments. The First Look Pro Map Designer program lets you modify the map data to show only the layers you want to see. You can change layer colors and line styles. You can even adjust the zoom factor when certain layers are displayed so details like street names don’t come on too early and make your map difficult to read.
Once your map data is set-up, install First Look Pro Map in all the mobile computers in your apparatus, copy over the modified map layer data, and install the GPS receiver. To ensure there are no conflicts with other programs or dispatching systems, a GPS receiver is included with First Look Pro Map. This receiver will only communicate with First Look Pro Map.
The next time you launch First Look Pro and look up an address, switch to First Look Pro Map. The map is displayed with a marker that shows the address you looked up. As soon as the GPS starts to send valid data, a vehicle symbol will be displayed on the map. This represents your current location. As the vehicle moves, the map is instantly updated to show the vehicle’s progress towards the address. The map is automatically zoomed in as you progress towards the address, or you can manually zoom in to see more of the street details.
First Look Pro with mobile mapping now consists of three separate programs:
1) First Look Pro – for organizing and displaying all of your pre-incident plans, including structural information, hazmat, site diagrams, photographs, etc.
2) First Look Pro Map – for displaying a map to an incident in the apparatus and showing the vehicle progress towards the incident.
3) First Look Pro Map Designer – for customizing your map data to optimize how it is displayed in the vehicles.
There is some initial setup that must be done in Map Designer before
you can use First Look Pro Map on your vehicles!
The First Look Pro and First Look Pro Map are always installed and used together on the apparatus. Map Designer is an administrator’s tool that is only used to set up the map data and get it ready for use. Map Designer would normally be used on a desktop computer by one person who is responsible for maintaining all of the map data. The only time Map Designer might be installed on a laptop or mobile data terminal is if you want to go to an address to capture its latitude and longitude values.
