I have added a new map with all the main roads in South Africa to http://www.planetgis.co.za/maps.php.

This is a snapshot of the Main Roads map. The main roads are based on the latest main roads from the Chief Directorate: Surveys & Mapping and has been significantly improved upon. All maps are available as free downloads. The Main Roads map is 15MB zipped or 10MB in 7-Zip format, but requires both the Administrative Boundaries and the Places map, which makes it a total download of nearly 137MB if you download the Zips or 73MB for the 7-Zips (if you don’t have those maps already). If you are unsure whether you’d like to download these maps, please take a look at this preview first.

New maps are available from http://www.planetgis.co.za/maps.php: Administrative Boundaries of South Africa and Places of South Africa.

This map contains the latest boundary data from the Municipal Demarcation Board as well as point locations of towns and cities in South Africa. The Administrative Boundaries map is available as a free download from our website (17MB zipped or 5MB in 7-zip format) and I’m sure will be very useful to many people. You can watch a quick preview of this map here and read more about it here.

A second, much larger map is also available as a bonus to all who have purchased PlanetGIS licenses. This map builds on the Administrative Boundaries map by adding the StatsSA main- and sub-place layers as well as nearly 60,000 place names from the South African Geographical Names System. I have also matched up most of the postal codes in South Africa with the sub-places, in the hope that it will be helpful to some. You can watch a preview of this map here. If you’d like to download this map, I suggest you get 7-Zip (http://www.7-zip.org/) because the file is significantly smaller in 7-zip compressed format (60MB instead of 105MB zipped). The Places map requires the Administrative Boundaries map. If you have purchased a PlanetGIS license and our system doesn’t know about it, please let me know and I’ll immediately activate access to this map for you.

Please let me know if you find these maps useful or if you have any questions / suggestions. If you have a useful map that you’d like to share, I would be very happy to post it on the site. I’m also looking for maps of which I can make little Flash presentations (as I’ve done for the maps mentioned here) to showcase all the wonderful maps being made with PlanetGIS on the website.

I am pleased to announce important updates to PlanetGIS. Version 2.43 is now available for download from http://www.planetgis.co.za/. This version is the culmination of a year of improvements since the previous release was announced. Some of the most exciting new features are support for MrSID images, the ability to create Flash maps (SWF), cascading deletes and easy polygon subdivision.

There has also been some changes at Planet GIS which might interest you. Firstly, you now have to log in with your email address and password in order to download updates. Please contact me if you have purchased PlanetGIS but do not have access to the updates.

Secondly, the free evaluation versions are now limited in the size of maps that can be saved. You can still open maps of any size, but will have to reduce the number of features to 5000 or less before you will be able to save changes. I believe this size limitation is adequate for educational or personal use - which is what the free version is intended for. If you need to be able to save larger maps in order to evaluate PlanetGIS or are doing non-commercial/non-profit work with PlanetGIS or are a student who needs to work with large maps, please contact me and I will promptly arrange access for you to an unrestricted version. There are no time or other limitations on the free versions and you can still accommodate bigger maps by separating your features into separate maps while displaying them together in the views of a master map.

And lastly, I have created 2 new editions of PlanetGIS for users that do not require advanced functions like generating buffers, etc. PlanetGIS Cartographer has everything needed to create and maintain a professional GIS map, while PlanetGIS Professional adds manipulation functions like rotation and the batch processing functions in design mode. PlanetGIS Enterprise (the full version) is intended for large organizations and municipalities or the GIS professional that needs-it-all. If you need commercial-grade support please obtain PlanetGIS Enterprise from companies like TGIS, Setplan or MetroGIS. For more information, please go to http://www.planetgis.co.za/.