We encountered Mapline recently, big claim to be “THE EASIEST MAPPING SOFTWARE ON THE PLANET”. We looked at what they might be offering here in Australia – obviously we pride ourselves on our postcode products here at MapMakers’ so sought out their offering (here’s a link to it –  update 2023 – well, looks like they’ve been shamed into deleting it..). As is so often the case when you find something that looks like a real good deal on-line, if it seems too good to be true, it probably is.. As a picture paints a thousand words, here are three:

Mapline’s on-line postal code offering, no date but it looks very much like the 2006 ABS postal areas – how slack is that?!

Here’s a shot of the actual 2006 postal areas, we can’t see detail in the cities but you get the gist.. it’s the same data.

Inaccurate and incomplete even back in the day!

And here’s what real Australian postcode area data looks like at the beginning of the third decade of the twenty-first century, rather than the middle of the first (which is pretty dodgy in the first place anyway, as explained and illustrated on this brief post). If your data is important, so is representing it in the right place with a MapMakers’ GIS data product! Otherwise – and to paraphrase the old truism – “rubbish in, rubbish out..”

Accurate, complete, current, down to every single valid address in the nation – an Australian first and only from Mapmakers Australia!