• QGIS 1.7.1 was released this week.  This is a bug fix release so there isn’t much new there other than cleaning up issues.  Check out those release notes to see what was updated.
• OpenLayers 2.11 also was released this week.  Don’t let the .01 update fool you, this is huge.  Specifically “native” support for touch devices (you know, like that thing called an iPad) and some big performance updates.  Clearly this is an update all who are running OpenLayers 2.10 should look at very closely.
• Esri Canvas Maps are now available in ArcGIS.com (er ArcGIS Online).  Now your paleo maps can have a little neo map flavor.  Everyone is a winner!  Yea that’s not really open source, but you can use it in OpenLayers so that’s a win for libre.

So FOSS4G has come and gone, in fact it came and went over a week ago. My day job kept me from posting about what happened last week, but the weekend always gives you time to write [ref]Especially while watching Arizona State demolish Southern Cal[/ref]. The near 1000 of us who attended saw all the great new initiatives around the open source geospatial community, but you probably didn’t. So here is what I see as where you should be looking in the next year before FOSS4G happens again.

• Mapnik is King — It seems every session had at least some Mapnik component to it. Mapnik is becoming the cartography engine of GIS. I saw cartography during FOSS4G 2011 that just blew my socks off. Innovation in this space is moving so fast and Mapnik is the choice for anyone who is making beautiful, useful maps.
• PostGIS — PostGIS 2.0 will come out early next year and you will have zero excuse to use any other spatial database. Much like Mapnik, most sessions had some sort of PostGIS component to them. If you don’t want to be left behind, get the book and start changing how you manage your location data.
• Designers — One thing that has always been a knock against “traditional GIS” is that it is designed by scientists for scientists. Totally unusable for ordinary users. What I noticed at FOSS4G 2011 was how many companies are employing designers to make sure their apps and maps are usable for everyone. Vizzuality and Development Seed[ref]Tell me that Dev Seed’s homepage isn’t awesome, I dare you.[/ref] have jump to the lead of pushing design in front of classic geospatial front ends. Vizzuality’s CartoSet is giving users tools that they can easily design beautiful mapping applications with little or no coding. Development Seed’s MapBox suite makes it easy to leverage the powerful Mapnik engine to produce tile caches that work out of the box without any need of expensive servers software. Awesome stuff.
• QGIS — At least in North America, QGIS is the desktop application of choice. I don’t recall seeing any gvSIG or uDIG[ref]Is uDig dead?[/ref] presentations, but QGIS was used by almost everyone. Over the last year it has morphed into a desktop GIS tool that is now my primary choice when working with GIS data. Combining QGIS with Mapnik gives me the ability to make beautiful cartography I cannot create anywhere else. It is completely liberating!
• JavaScript not Flex/Silverlight — Yea, it isn’t much of a surprise, open source users aren’t big Flex or Silverlight users, but JavaScript HTML5 web apps are everywhere and doing everything Flex/Silverlight can do, but work everywhere[ref]When I refer to everywhere, I choose to ignore IE 6, 7, 8. If you’re stuck on those, find a new job[/ref]. At this point it is safe to call every Flex/Silverlight location app as legacy as nobody in their right mind would be coding with those tools in 2012.

FOSS4G 2011 was probably the best Geospatial/Location Conference I’ve been to. Paul Ramsey put it best when he said:

I told some folks at FOSS4G 2011 that I thought this year’s event was the “best FOSS4G ever” (HT, Juan Antonio Samaranch) but that wasn’t just tongue in cheek. 2011 was the biggest ever, but only a few attendees more than Barcelona in 2010. Yet somehow I felt more energized, more connected, like I had more conversations, than in 2010.

That was pretty much exactly how I felt. I was connect to the attendees, I was energized by the talks and left feeling like at least a portion of the geospatial community has a future in front of it. What is best about this community it is free to join. Just bring your experiences and get started.

We are pleased to announce the latest release in our 1.X series of releases. To download your copy, please visit the QGIS download page. This release is named after the town of Wroclaw in Poland. The Department of Climatology and Atmosphere Protection, University of Wroclaw kindly hosted our last developer meeting in November 2010.

The release has some great new symbology and data management improvements continuing the push of QGIS as a full fledged GIS client.  I use QGIS much more than any GIS client these days[ref]Most of that has to do with me being on Mac OS X but it is a reality.[/ref] and coupled with FME, there isn’t anything I can’t do.

The worst part about the rule based rendering [in QGIS] is that I have gotten so used to their power that I feel crippled when I go back to MapInfo and try to do styling

Yea, cartography has been the one area people still say ArcGIS is king.  Times, they be a changing though…

Is ArcView use about to fall off the ledge?

I found this photo in the GIS Archives of the Library of Congress of President Ford and the GIS Turkey.

HT: National Thanksgiving Turkey Presentation

Hello – is that open source desktop GIS that I’m looking for?

just keeps getting easier and easier to get a fully functional open source GIS workstation up and running thanks to Ubuntu. The following instructions will take your vanilla installation of Ubuntu 7.10 and add the following top-notch desktop GIS applications:

Postgresql/PostGIS : a relational database with vector spatial data handling
GRASS : A full blown GIS analysis toolset
Quantum GIS: A user-friendly graphical GIS application
GDAL, Proj, Geos : Libraries and utilities for processing spatial data
Mapserver : web mapping program and utilites
Python bindings for QGIS, mapserver and GDAL
GPSBabel : for converting between various GPS formats
R : a high-end statistics package with spatial capabilities
GMT : the Generic Mapping Tools for automated high-quality map output

Download Ubuntu, install, run a simple command, enjoy GIS for free. Seems like a great solution to me!

Look how fun OSGeo is!

Anyway I was hanging out at Duke’s Waikiki and randomly started talking to the group next to me at the bar. Turns out that they are all readers of my blog and have been migrating their GIS from an ESRI only shop to a combination ESRI/open source shop. It was interesting to hear how they were picking and choosing the best products from ESRI and open source to help them better get their work done. What was also interesting is that they didn’t decrease their maintenance costs, but reallocated. They’ve replaced most of their ArcView seats with QGIS, replaced all but one license of ArcSDE with PostGIS and in turn used those savings to buy more licenses of ArcInfo and extensions. They’ve been able to give their high end GIS analysts the tools they feel that they need to get their work done, but still increased their GIS production. Every person at their company has either an ArcInfo or QGIS license on their desk that they can connect to WMS services hosted by MapServer and PostGIS.

I wish I could have spent more time with them talking about this, but they were heading to China in the morning so they needed to get to bed. I liked how they were able to give better tools to everyone by prioritizing what they needed and picked the best tools for the job.

We are getting really close to the 0.9 release of QGIS so there isn’t a better time to get familiar with what is becoming the choice in open source desktop GIS (to be fair I like what I see in gvSIG as well).

QGIS 0.9 Splash Screen