It has been 5 months since my last update and many PlanetGIS users started to wonder if I am still around. Well, it has been a crazy 5 months and I have lots to tell you. During this time we (the company) quietly turned 10 years old. As you may know, our software is quite a bit older, but a very nice milestone to reach for us indeed. Apart from trying to complete too many things in-between updates, I disappeared into a large project for nearly two months. This project was the starting point for PlanetGIS entering the mobile computing world, but more about that at a later date.

Creating a new manual for Planet - one that someone might actually read and find useful - proved to be a lot more work than I first anticipated. I wanted to create a tutorial that one can read sequentially while learning all the important bits in a more-or-less logical order. I keep going back to the earlier chapters and adding content as I receive questions that I’ve had to answer a few times before. Now I’ve realized that the manual will never be finished. Just like Planet, it will continue to grow and get better. I have now placed most of the chapters that are nearly complete or useful as-is on a wiki. Because there are still many parts of the manual that simply says “todo”, we are still some way off from a printable PDF. Anyone that have registered on our website can participate in this effort. If you’d like to change the wording of a sentence so that it makes better sense, please do! If you want to start your own chapter on a specific topic that you feel should be covered, go right ahead! My helpers and myself will monitor the wiki continually while we’re also adding to it. We will rearrange things that are out of place, and if you messed something up - that is OK - because we can easily roll back to a previous version. The PlanetGIS wiki is here: www.planetgis.co.za/wiki

I have also finally put up a blog. This, and all my previous newsletters are on the blog, but the idea is to have more frequent updates about what’s happening on Planet GIS. I’ll do my best to post something on the blog each time a new feature is implemented or when something interesting is happening relating to PlanetGIS. Please feel free to comment to my posts! Very soon there will also be a forum where we can discuss problems and new features. The PlanetGIS Blog is here: www.planetgis.co.za/blog

And finally, version 3.0.8 of PlanetGIS is now ready. Please download it here. The main highlights of this new version are:

• Raster transparency: you can now specify the opacity of raster layers in the display properties. As with transparent fills in Planet, the image is dithered onto the screen instead of per-pixel blending, but this is much more efficient when printing.
• Conditional display by feature density. Ever set up your map to work perfectly in a built-up area but when you pan to a rural area the map is empty? See Maximum feature density in the wiki!
• Get current Google Earth viewport. If you’ve just saved an image from Google Earth, this new option will position your image automatically by asking GE what its current viewport is.
• New database drivers. This is what’s been taking so long. The new database drivers are still being tested and are available in addition to the old ones. PlanetGIS now also has a “built-in” SQL server, courtesy of SQLite. The database connections interface has also been completely revamped. Please read about it in detail in the wiki.

Because of some fundamental changes in the database connections, maps saved in version 3.0.8 won’t work the same with older versions of Planet, so please make a backup of your maps.

Tags: update wiki blog

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 20th, 2009 at 1:25 pm and is filed under Announcements. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.