In this update:

Small Talk
Season’s Greetings and Thank-Yous
2008 Report-back
A Ten Year Anniversary Coming Up
Exciting New Developments for 2009
Annual Price Increase

Small Talk. By now, most subscribers to this newsletter - especially those in the Southern Hemisphere - are basking in the sun or taking time out at their favourite holiday destinations. I hope you are thoroughly enjoying it! For others - like myself - this is a time of high productivity because the phones have stopped ringing and there are very few unexpected demands on our time. One is allowed to “go into the flow” without the interruptions and on some days produce more than what three (productive) people normally would. If you have been blessed - like me - with a vocation (with an o) that you thoroughly enjoy, you don’t need a vacation (with an a)… you only need some quiet!

Season’s Greetings and Thank-Yous. I would like to take this opportunity to wish everyone a fantastic festive season and extend a huge thank you for all your support and well wishes during the year. May you have a wonderful time with your family and friends.

2008 Report-back. 2008 has been a phenomenal year for Planet GIS. This year alone, we have gained 209 new clients of which 74 purchased software licenses and we’ve added a total of 253 licensed users to our database (many of which would be old clients upgrading to version 3.0). Our free map download service has also been received with tremendous acclaim. Since we introduced the service in April, nearly 500GB of data has been downloaded. We have also gained many friends!

A Ten Year Anniversary Coming Up. On April 9th, 2009 our company turns 10 years old! The software, however, has already been under development for nearly five years when the company was incorporated in April of 1999. We’ve been through some tough times and for many years relied on consulting work to keep the ship afloat and fund the software development. Your marvellous support during 2008 meant that our 10th year had been the best one ever!

Exciting New Developments for 2009. The New Year will be a very exciting one for us. You may notice a lot of changes on our website during this month already. In January we will be launching updated online documentation (a Wiki), a development Blog and support forums. I would like to thank TGIS (www.tgis.co.za) for donating a large sum of money toward the development of a new technical manual. TGIS has been an invaluable part of our success since the early days. Thank you guys & gals from the bottom of my heart!

Annual Price Increase. We will be introducing price increases early in January. Software functionality has been snowballing and we’re adding a lot of value around the software to help you get the most out of it. Since recently purchases of software licenses, for example, include a full year of software updates, regardless of the jump in version number (eg. 3.0 to 4.0). We need to make some price adjustments to keep this ship on an even keel, especially with the roughly 14% devaluation of the South African Rand (locally) over the past year. If you have been considering purchasing software licenses, now would be a good time if you are able…

I am happy to announce the release of version 3.0.6 of PlanetGIS, now available for downloading. This update features dozens of improvements and also some cool new features requested by our users:

• Bug fix: the style element prioritization feature introduced in 3.0.5 also caused raster images to be drawn 11 times over. It is a testament to Planet’s rendering speed since it was only noticed by a few users who complained about hugely increased print job sizes!
• Improved labelling. Up to 4 different labels can be stored with a feature’s geometry and you can create separate displays showing specific labels. Labels can now also be set to not align with a line feature and a new font style introduces “boxed” text;
• Zoom extents & feature count menu options for displays;
• Much improved handling of displays which visibility depends on scale constraints in either the display properties or style properties;
• A new streamlined Quick Launch start-up screen;
• Selected features are now also printed with the user defined selection style;
• Maps relying on other maps can now be set to only open those maps when they are needed, eg. once zoomed to small enough scale or when a display is toggled from hidden to visible;
• Drawing priority for style elements: you can now group individual style elements (pens, fills, fonts and symbols) into priority slots to determine the drawing order. This new feature enables you to make road maps with outlined roads;
• Proximity select and containment select now allows you to select multiple feature classes;
• Discover Spatial Tables feature (currently only for Oracle Spatial);
• Zoom to same location: jump to the same geographic position in another opened map;
• More “select all” options: visible features, features in map, features in view.

Please log in to your user account to download the latest update: www.planetgis.co.za/login.php and let me know if you need any assistance.

Our Gauteng cadastral map is *finally* ready. Please preview it here: http://www.planetgis.co.za/browsemap.php?id=88. It took more time to prepare the Gauteng map for the parcel locator than all the other completed provinces put together. Now on to Limpopo and Mpumalanga…

Are you familiar with the OpenStreetMap project? OpenStreetMap is a project aimed at creating and providing free geographic data such as street maps to anyone who wants them. Contributors to OpenStreetMap take GPS devices with them on journeys, or go out specially to record GPS tracks. They record street names, place names and other features using notebooks, digital cameras, and voice-recorders. Back at the computer, contributors upload those GPS logs showing where they travelled, and trace-out the roads on OpenStreetMap’s collaborative database. Using their notes, contributors add the street names, information such as the type of road or path, and the connections between roads. That data is then processed to produce detailed street-level maps, which can be published freely on sites such as Wikipedia, used to create handheld or in-car navigation devices, or printed and copied without restriction.

I’ve known about this project for some time, but after watching its coverage grow exponentially (click to see animation) for a while now, I eventually got very excited about it. This project has become the Wikipedia of street maps and has a real potential to surpass the accuracy and completeness of expensive commercial street maps in the near future… sustainably. With this data you can do whatever you like as long as you acknowledge the source, and you don’t ever have to pay for updates. The more people that get involved, the more updates you’ll see, and it’s all free. It is very easy to add streets, change streets (or any other type of feature) and change or add attributes like names. Anyone can do it!

You can download this open and free street map of South Africa, as a PlanetGIS map, now from our website. Because this is such a living map, I will post an update on our website once per month. Your changes to the map will be included! View it or download it here: www.planetgis.co.za/browsemap.php?id=15. You can see how quickly the map is growing on this page: www.planetgis.co.za/sa-osm-progress.php.

A lot of changes have been made to Planet over the past month and a half. You have to get the latest version (3.0.5) to see this street map properly. Changes include such things as multiple labels for features, boxed labels, prioritized styles, and much much more. If you use 3.0.4 or earlier to view this street map, it won’t look anything like it should.

Other news is that the searchable cadastral map for KwaZulu Natal is now ready for download.

Let me know if you would like to contribute to OSM, the Free Wiki World Map.

We are happy to announce the release of version 3.0.4 of PlanetGIS, now available for download. This update features dozens of improvements and also some cool new features requested by our users:

• Transparent fills. You can now fill polygons and specify how much of underlying features should remain visible. We have chosen to do this in a way that is consistent with how transparency is simulated by printer drivers, so the hard-copy quality is superb;
• Automatic redraw. Need to track your vehicles in real-time on that big screen?
• User definable hot-spots for symbols;
• Much improved import/export of coordinates from databases;
• Control over the output resolution of PNG and other image formats;
• Batch orientation of points and text to nearby lines and polygon facets;
• Change label capitalization. Ever wanted all your streets, etc labelled in Title Case instead of UPPER CASE?
• Partial containment selects: you can now specify a percentage overlap across boundaries;
• Improved support for Oracle Spatial;
• You can now export labels with KML (Google Earth) files; and
• A new selection hatch for optimal visibility of selected polygons;

Please log in to your user account to download the latest update: www.planetgis.co.za/login.php and let me know if you need any assistance.

Other news is that we are a sponsor at the FOSS4G conference in Cape Town at the end of September. The Free and Open Source Software for GIS conference incorporates GISSA 2008 and is the most important GIS event in Africa this year. We will have a spot at Open Spatial’s stand where attendees can try out PlanetGIS. If you’re interested in attending, please click here.

Map downloads from our website just passed the 50 gigabyte mark for September to date. I added a small file which improves the appearance of some layers, puts the provinces together (if you want) and integrates the contour maps (if you have them). Did you get what you needed?

During June this year we managed to obtain the latest cadastral data from the various Surveyors General offices as well as the latest topographic 1:50,000 vector maps from the Chief Directorate: Surveys & Mapping in Mowbray. It has been over a month’s work to compile these datasets into user-friendly PlanetGIS maps, and we’re still working on the cadastral maps. I have been placing the maps on our website as they were completed and for July and August to date there has been nearly 100 Gigabytes of downloads!

The maps are now broken down by province to make the file sizes a bit more manageable for downloading. For all provinces you will find the very latest of the following:

• Topographic 1:50,000 vector maps
• 20m contours (complete coverage)
• 5m contours (partial coverage)

The new cadastral maps are ready for the Western, Eastern and Northern Cape as well as the Free State. We are currently working on KZN and Limpopo and the other provinces will follow soon. These maps now come with a search engine. Click on the “locate” button (the button with the binoculars) and select “Locate a land parcel”…

The new maps may all be downloaded from http://www.planetgis.co.za/browse.php?id=20.

Please let me know what you think of the maps. Your feedback is highly valued.

If you are interested in learning to use PlanetGIS to its full potential, would you consider attending a 3-day intensive training course in Pretoria?

TGIS (www.tgis.co.za) hosts a training course during the first week of every month in Olympus, Pretoria East. All the attendees I’ve spoken to were raving about the course and assured me that they were much closer to being experts on PlanetGIS. One recently told me that, having been a rookie in the GIS field until before the training, he was able to impress his experienced (non-Planet-user) colleagues with his abilities to produce maps in a very short time.

The cost of the training course is R1000 per person per day (excl. VAT). You will also receive a comprehensive training manual, and I guarantee that - at a minimum - you will be astounded by all the things you didn’t know you could do with Planet. The classes start at 9am and last until 4pm every day and a light lunch is provided around 1pm.

The next course is 7-9th July, with only 7 spaces left. If you can’t make that one the next is 4-6 August. Please let me know ASAP if you are interested.

I am excited to announce that version 3.0.2 of PlanetGIS is now available for download. This update fixes a number of bugs, introduces dozens of minor improvements and some cool new features:

• Feature duplication. Easily create any amount of duplicate features by specifying an offset and direction - greatly improves your ability to capture e.g. property boundaries;
• New CAD functions. Interactive translation and rotation (moving features around by dragging); and
• Enhanced colour picker. A powerful new tool for selecting just the right colour.

Please log in to your user account to download the latest update: www.planetgis.co.za/login.php and let me know if you need any assistance.

30 Days, sixty Gigabytes downloaded, 33000 hits on our website and over 800 new people on the mailing list later, I am a little surprised by the current need for data. South African GIS data. Just over 30 days ago, I uploaded half a gigabyte of highly compressed maps to Amazon.com and many people have since downloaded all of them. Now, if you did and you are on 3G - like me - this would have cost you R200 (40c/MB) and taken at least 5 hours to download. (Hopefully you have uncapped ADSL!). Then to uncompress the files, first un7zip and then also uncompress and index in Planet, add at least 2 more hours. So, unless you were blessed with really fast internet and everything went exactly right the first time, you have (or rather your computer has) spent a whole working day to get the maps installed. Furthermore, if you did all of the above - and liked what you saw - you probably emailed me to ask about contour data, satellite images and/or aerial photography!

Now… someone once told me: “Never underestimate the bandwidth of a truck loaded full of DVDs”, so I’ve enlisted the help of a company that can produce and dispatch large quantities of DVDs, on demand, within a 24 hour lead time. Then, I created the PlanetGIS DiscoveryDisc.

This is a single DVD containing all our essential maps which you can run straight from the DVD (you don’t even have to install Planet). On the DiscoveryDisc you will find:

• Landsat7 satellite images for the whole of South Africa (15m resolution).
• Administrative Boundaries (provinces, district and local municipalities as obtained from the Municipal Demarcation Board).
• Main roads of SA (national, regional, secondary and arterial routes with route numbers)
• Place names from the SA Geographic Name Server: over 58000 place names.

That is as much as we could squeeze on one standard DVD without compression, but if you need more, read on. Here is a snapshot of the Oudtshoorn/George area as viewed from the DiscoveryDisc: (you may have to tell your email reader to display images)

As you can see, you can create stunning maps with the Landsat7 images as a backdrop. Here is another, zoomed in over the Central Karoo, which shows the place names for even the remotest of places, holes, koppies, etc.:

You can order the DiscoveryDisc from our website for R49 + postage & tax. This barely covers our direct costs, but I hope that it will eventually end up on thousands of computers. This DVD contains valuable information worth many times more. Please order the DiscoveryDisc here: www.planetgis.co.za/order.php. You can use these maps in your projects, make as many copies as you like and give/sell it to whomever you like.

OK, Paul, this is very nice… but I need more!

For the more data-hungry, I have created more options: instead of the DiscoveryDisc you can order the PlanetGIS DataDiscs or DataDiscs+. The DataDiscs are two DVDs containing 17.5GB of compressed data that you need to extract to your hard drive. We have created an installer that makes it really easy. On the DataDiscs you will find:

• Everything on the DiscoveryDisc, plus:
• Topographic 1:50 000 (vector) maps for the whole of SA;
• Cadastral data (original farms, farm portions, erven and street names) for the whole of SA;
• Statistics SA’s main and subplaces (similar to suburbs with well known names, used for collecting and aggregating census data);
• 20m contours for the whole of SA.

On the DataDiscs+ you will get all of the above, plus an extra DVD containing all the 5m contours that are available for South Africa and the 2001 census data.

Finally, you might be interested in the PlanetGIS DataSpindle (all the above, plus the scanned 1:50000 and 1:250000 topographic map sheets in a single map… really cool!) and PlanetGIS DataDrive! (adding over 600GB of orthophotography). More about these in a future announcement.

You will find a description of all our data products here: www.planetgis.co.za/data.php.

To order, please log in on www.planetgis.co.za/login.php.

I am happy to announce that version 3.0.1 of all editions of PlanetGIS is now available for download. This update fixes a number of bugs, introduces dozens of minor improvements and 2 new features:

• Dual coordinate systems. You can now have your maps in geographic projection (lat/long) but do measurements and view coordinates in a projected coordinate system. The most appropriate projection parameters are automatically chosen for the target area; and
• Batch printing. Specify a selection or a whole feature class to use for determining the position of pages. There are various options for selecting appropriate scales for printing and you can also create images (BMP/JPEG/PNG) instead of printing. This can save you days!

Please log in to your user account to download the latest update: www.planetgis.co.za/profile.php and let me know if you need anything.

Many thanks to TGIS for funding a large part of the above developments.