You can now download all our very popular South African maps from Amazon.com’s S3 service and - better yet - use BitTorrent to get them. These files are highly compressed, but they’re still quite big, which makes downloading them the conventional way error prone and frustrating if you don’t have a very fast and reliable Internet connection. You have the option of downloading them the non-geeky (boring!) way by using these links:

https://s3.amazonaws.com/SA-maps/SA-administrative.exe (5.5MB)
https://s3.amazonaws.com/SA-maps/SA-places.exe (27.2MB)
https://s3.amazonaws.com/SA-maps/SA-roads.exe (4.3MB)
https://s3.amazonaws.com/SA-maps/SA-cadastral.exe (173MB)
https://s3.amazonaws.com/SA-maps/SA-topo50.exe (166MB)
https://s3.amazonaws.com/SA-maps/SA-topo50-water.exe (48.2MB)
https://s3.amazonaws.com/SA-maps/SA-topo50-water2.exe (157MB)

OR… use BitTorrent (www.bittorrent.com) - and use these .torrent files to get the maps:

https://s3.amazonaws.com/SA-maps/SA-administrative.exe?torrent
https://s3.amazonaws.com/SA-maps/SA-places.exe?torrent
https://s3.amazonaws.com/SA-maps/SA-roads.exe?torrent
https://s3.amazonaws.com/SA-maps/SA-cadastral.exe?torrent
https://s3.amazonaws.com/SA-maps/SA-topo50.exe?torrent
https://s3.amazonaws.com/SA-maps/SA-topo50-water.exe?torrent
https://s3.amazonaws.com/SA-maps/SA-topo50-water2.exe?torrent

BitTorrent will make sure that the files you download are exactly the same as the files on our server, and will probably get the files much quicker. It is also no problem if your Internet connection gets interrupted because it will keep trying to download the files chunk-by-chunk, and it will verify the integrity of each chunk.

The files listed above are self-extracting 7-zip files. Once they are uncompressed, PlanetGIS will uncompress them a lot more, so make sure you have about 9GB of disk space available before you start. You will need PlanetGIS 3.0 to open these maps. Please let me know if you have any problems downloading the maps.

I am very happy to finally announce the launch of version 3.0 of PlanetGIS. The changes to the internal storage format have been pushed out to a future version, so version 3.0 will be 100% compatible with your existing 2.x maps.

Version 3.0 introduces a new user interface which looks much better if you are using themes on Windows XP or Vista, complete Vista compatibility and integration with Oracle Spatial, to name but a few improvements. You will also notice that version 3.0 is a little faster!

If you have purchased 2.x licenses in the past 6 months, you should already have your license keys on your user page on www.planetgis.co.za. (If not please let me know). If you have purchased licenses in the past 18 months, we kindly invite you to enroll in our software maintenance programme. Under this programme you will receive all future updates and revisions for about 25% of the list price of your software per year. So, you can upgrade to PlanetGIS Professional 3.0 now, for example, for only R650. As for you old-timers… we’ll give you 33% off for an upgrade. Please reply if you need more information. You can place your orders here.