Thursday, December 8, 2011

uDig 1.3.0 Released

The uDig Community is pleased to announce the release of uDig 1.3.0.

This release is made in conjunction with GeoTools 8.0-M4. Thanks to Andrea Amie and Gabriel Roldan for support, encouragement and timely bug fixes.

This point release includes significant usability improvements and new functionality - thanks to the hard work of Levi Putna and Paul Pfeiffer.

For more information on User-friendly Desktop Internet GIS please check out the uDig Overview.

Release Details

Download the package appropriate to your platform, unzip and run:

About uDig 1.3

This release features some great usability improvements with a new tool palette and easy to access tool options.

Here are some new features you can look forward to:

  • Area of Interest support - define your area of interest based on CRS, current screen or a bookmark
  • Filter the Table view using the current area of interest - a great way to focus on what is on screen
  • Updated Info and Profile tool for raster data
  • Teradata support
  • Spatial Toolbox view allowing access to OMS3 processing; with tutorial!
  • New import and export formats: CSV and KML.
  • Check out What is new page for details

Usability Improvements

  • New Tool Palette with easy to use Tool Options for quick access to preferences (blog)
  • New "cheatsheet" help system offering guide assistance to new users (blog)
  • Control Tool interaction with your layers with the ability to mark background layers

Additional documentation:

For developers:
  • Access to the latest GeoTools 8.0-M4 release
  • Access to the latest JTS 1.12
  • Access to the latest ImageIO-EXT 1.1.2
  • Fork me on github
  • Works with Eclipse 3.7

Tuesday, October 4, 2011

Adding CheatSheets Interactive Help to uDig

I have been putting together the release notes for the upcoming uDig 1.2.3 and ran into a really great usability feature that we have not mentioned on our blog feed yet.

The next release of uDig includes the concept of "Cheatsheets"; these act in a manner similar to a wizard (in that the provide a series of steps); but instead are designed to supliment the running application. What is impressive is the "Click to Perform" button which will perform the task it is describing so it can show you the result.

The Quickstart cheatsheet included in uDig 1.2.3 uses this to great effect when showing the differences between the normal Map Perspective (used for working on data) and the Style Perspective (used for working on presentation).

What is even more impressive is this form of help follows you into dialogs and screens offering helpful advice as it shows you how to perform an activity.

The traditional uDig online documentation is of course still available.

This week in udig - Sep - Week 4


Levi Putna is making progress in the development of Smart Buffer tool, the following demo shows how it works.


Levi has done a great work with Map Status Bar Tool Options. It can now take a preference page id that will be opened when the tool icon is clicked in the status bar option contribution. 

Emily have resolved the following bugs (thanks a lot!):

Jesse, Jody and Mauricio have done the codereview of the issues described above.



Monday, October 3, 2011

Tool Palette and Options

Tools have gotten a major usability improvement featuring:

  • ToolPalette - used to quickly explore available tools, configure tool display to show labels, descriptions or large icons for a helpful hand when learning. By default the Palette is displayed along side your Map; you can also Choose Show View > Other and Open the Palette on its own as a tear off View. This is great for users with more than one monitor or when you have multiple maps open side by side. This is the same Palette used during Page printing.
  • ToolOptions - quick access to common tool preferences from the Map Status Line. This has allowed us to reduce the number of tools while maintaining the same functionality.

These change combine to make uDig even more User-friendly with a presentation of tools similar to a paint program. As an example edit tools can use the area to make options such as "snapping" visible (previously available as a keyboard shortcut!). It is also an efficient use of screen real estate as snapping options do not waste space when they are not needed.

Palette

Here are a couple examples how how the palette looks using the Large Icons preference.

Extension

uDig practices an open development model with a couple Request for Change proposals being closed today.

As part of that the following pages have been updated in the user guide:

For more information about what is new in the uDig 1.2 series see the user guide.

And developer documentation for the new tool option functionality:

The good bit is covered here:
public class OptionContribtionItem extends ToolOptionContributionItem {
     public IPreferenceStore fillFields( Composite parent ) {
            Button check = new Button(parent,  SWT.CHECK );
            check.setText("Scale");
            addField( NavigationToolPreferencePage.SCALE, check );
         
            Button tiled = new Button(parent,  SWT.CHECK );
            tiled.setText("Tiled");
            addField( NavigationToolPreferencePage.TILED, tiled );
            
            return ToolsPlugin.getDefault().getPreferenceStore();
        }
    };

Tuesday, September 27, 2011

uDig Source Code Visualisation

Continuing on to uDig for a great gource visualisation showing the impact of a couple of code sprints in 2010; and a new development team starting up in 2011.

Here is the link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cqxXJ7bOBTg and the video itself is shown below.

Aside: This is a much better visualisation as I have been learning to gource control options (so the video tracks activity for a better view of what is going on).

By popular request (on IRC) here are the command line options used for code.google.com/p/gource project.

I started by using "camera-mode" track to make the action focused; I also really lowered the number of seconds used to represent each day so that we could quickly cover two years of development.

gource -title uDig -1280x720 --camera-mode track --auto-skip-seconds 1 --seconds-per-day 0.05 -o udig.ppm 

And then I stitched the result into a movie using ffmpeg:

 ffmpeg -y -b 10000K -r 60 -f image2pipe -vcodec ppm -i udig.ppm -vcodec libx264 -vpre slow -threads 0 -bf 0 udig.x264.mp4

Wednesday, September 21, 2011

THIS WEEK IN UDIG - SEP - WEEK 3


  • Jody has done a geat difusion task in FOSS4G2011 Denver. He leaded the uDig code sprint. It looks like the people have had a good time as is shown in the event's snapshots
  • Emily Gouge has been working to fix up some bugs in the uDig paltform. 

Sunday, September 11, 2011

THIS WEEK IN UDIG - SEP - WEEK 2

The community is working to improve the user experience in uDig.

- Levi Putna and Jody Garnett are presented the Map Status Bar Tool Options idea, that will allow a better access to the different tool options.

- uDig will have a new useful tools Smart Buffer, it have been proposed by Levi Putna.

- Jesse and Andrea have provided feedback and good advices to carry out those ideas.

- Jody was cleaning the java 5 compliance from uDig platform code to allow to
use the override annotation with the java 6 semantic (to override interface
signatures).

- Mauricio is advancing in the udig Weather vision. He was analyzing the GUI requirements for the weather desktop.

Monday, September 5, 2011

THIS WEEK IN UDIG - SEP - WEEK 1

- The University of Trento has ufficialized the next
courses about hydrology, geomorphology, water supply systems and stormwaters, based on uDig and engineering tools developed by HydroloGIS. More info.

- Jesse and Andrea have done the code review of GEF Palette.

- Jody and Scott have improved and updated the "Getting Started". The following pages were updated:

SDK Quickstart
Plugin Tutorial
Custom Application Tutorial
Workbench Tutorial

- John Hudson have update the worktrough 1. The new tool palette is shown in the screenshots.

- Mauricio have tested the udig internal snapshot with the community update site (1.2).


Monday, August 22, 2011

THIS WEEK IN UDIG - AUGUST - WEEK 3

Our weekly summary:

- Andrea Antonello has nominate Levi for commit access. He has helped review the palette change request.

- Mauricio was checking the status of part of puzzle required for uDig Weather: gt-greb1, gt-netcdf, jgrass plugins. He was done a quickly review of what the meteorolgy communiy has written about standards.

- The LisaSoft team, John Hudson, Scott Henderson and Jody Garnett , has made the integration of the new GEF Palette tool . The following video shows the new look and feel of uDig.It is a great contribution for uDig project, thanks LisaSoft.






Monday, August 15, 2011

THIS WEEK IN UDIG - AUGUST - WEEK 2

- Kenneth Gulbrandsoy has proposed to migrate uDig project persistance to Common Data Object (CDO). He has evaluated the efforts required and has finished the initial design. The PSC has approved the CDO proposal.

- Andrea has been working in some enhancements in Single band raster styling.

- Jody was improving the icons presentation.

- Jesse and Jody have reviewed the GEF Tool Palette proposed by Levi and Scott. The proposal was approved by the PSC.

- Mauricio has been analyzing the data structures used in the weather domain to share data. A draft of Data Weather Analysis and Forecast document was done. Moreover, he was reading the work done by Andrea Antonelo in the project Netcdf in JGrass.

Saturday, August 6, 2011

This week in uDig - August - Week 1

This week we want to highlight the following activities.

- Jody. He has made a progress in looking how to convert our wiki (which is in textile) into actual source code (now that eclipse supports textile). This would allow us to keep our developers guide github (but would require developer to use the help menu; or someone to run a helpviewer on a webserver).

- Levi. The concept proof of cheet sheet idea is in the main branch of udig-platform. He has committed some cheet sheet examples.

- Jesse has been replying to community questions. He is working in the teradata update site for the latest teradata plugin.

- Andrea is finishing the Java Open Source GIS Development course for the Potsdam University. He was teaching about uDig, Geotools and jGrass Tools.

- Mauricio has updated the Developer Tutorials. He began the inception for uDig Weather.

- The PSC has reviewed the cheat sheet merge request.

Saturday, July 30, 2011

This week in uDig

This post is a summary of what the uDig community has done this week.

- Jody Garnett is currently working on the GeoTools gt-process code. This should allow uDig to make use of some great new operations such as cookie-cutter that are being brought over from the GeoServer project.

- Jody has released an uDig 1.2.2 SDK; users are invited to test.

- Frank Gasdorf has been updating the OSGeo Live DVD content to ensure the latest version of uDig is well represented.

- Andrea Antonello is preparing a training for the university of Potsdam. He will teach how to write models and use them in the uDig Spatial Toolbox. He will afterwards release them
as official docs for geotools/uDig.

- Putna Levi has drafted up the idea of adding cheat sheets to uDig. New users will benefit greatly from there introduction and it will help streamline the initial learning process.

- Mauricio Pazos has improved the CQL parser including the Relate Geooperation which allows to evaluate a pair of geometry taking in to account the intersection matrix (DE-9IM).

- We have formally switched over to Eclipse 3.7; and are looking forward to working with the new GUI designer.

Wednesday, July 13, 2011

uDig 1.2.2 Released

The uDig Community is overjoyed to announce the release of uDig 1.2.2.

This release is made in conjunction with GeoTools 8.0-M1 and the OSGeoLive DVD projects. We would like to thank these communities for their support. In particular a kind word goes out to Andrea Amie and Micheal Bedward and Daniele Romagnoli for a smooth GeoTools release in support of our schedule. Aslo a tip of the hat to Frank Gasforf and Cameron Shorter and the OSGeo Live project for setting the schedule (in conjunction with FOSS4G)

We would also like to thank Levi Punta and Nathaniel Keslo for sorting out a patch allowing uDig to use Natural Earth dataset out of the box.

Release Details

Download the package appropriate to your platform, unzip and run:

About uDig 1.2.2

The release adds a number of new features and updates the uDig platform to the latest open source libraries.

Here is what you can look forward to in the desktop application:

  • Extensive update to online help including uDig Overview
  • Spatial Toolbox view allowing access to OMS3 processing; with a step by step Introduction to Spatial Toolbox tutorial
  • Updated Info and Profile tool for raster data
  • Teradata support
  • New import and export formats: CSV and KML.
  • For information on additional new features visit our What is new page
For developers:
  • Access to the latest GeoTools 8.0-M1
  • Access to the latest ImageIO-EXT and finally a modern version of GDAL (on supported platforms)
  • The uDig git repository has moved to github to join the cool kids - and shows a very healthy stream of pull requests.
  • Works with Eclipse 3.6

Tuesday, June 21, 2011

Running the Image Georeferencing View. Release 1.0.0 for uDig 1.2.1

We have released the Image Georeferencing View, versiĆ³n 1.0.0. It was tested with uDig 1.2.1. The following video shows a typical session.

In this video the user adds the ground control points (GCP) using a road layer as base.





The following video shows as a georeferenced raster can be used to draw a new road layer (vector layer) .
To georeference the raster, the user provides the set of ground control points graved by a GPS device.





Thursday, May 19, 2011

Image Georeferencing View RC3 for uDig 1.2.1


We have released the Image Georeferencing View RC-3. It includes some new user interface features that show the relations between image's marks and the set of gound control points. New tools have been inlcuded in order to manipulate the image and the ground control points.


Finally, the Help (draft) is available too.

To know more about this project, please, go to Axios Community Space.

Wednesday, May 4, 2011

Image Georeferencing View for uDig 1.2.1

A month ago, we began the development of Image Georeferencing. Now we want to share the first release in order to test it.



Right now, we are working in some improvements in the usability (zoom, pan, fit, etc). More details and download instructions in the Axios Community Wiki

Comments are welcome

Friday, March 11, 2011

udig development version available for osgeo4w users

After finally upgrading the Osgeo4w version of uDig to the current 1.2.1, we also decided to add the development version of uDig to the game. It might be a bit unstable from time to time and handle itself like the evil brother of uDig



If you installed it you should feel its presence through its devil red icon in the applications menu.

One good reason to try that out is because it has some nice features that would not be there before an official release. One example is for sure the georeferencing tool that was resurrected from the community repository by moovida and jive. Have a look at some nice screenshot and docs for the module.

What will be next? The line cleaner?
The doors are open...

Spatial Operations Tutorials for Udig 1.2.1

Hello everyone, recently, we have improved the Spatial Operation Framework in order to do easy its extension with some new operations. Thus, we have updated the following tutorials:
  • How to add a New Spatial Operation

  • Reusing Existent Spatial Process. Integrating Sextante


Important, this new feature is compatible with uDig 1.2.1.

To download, visit the section Tutorials and Documents in www.axios.es

Tuesday, March 8, 2011

Spatial Operations & Editing Tools for uDig 1.2.1

We have published a new release of our Spatial Operations & Editing Tools for uDig 1.2.1 project.
It includes many fixed bugs and performance improvements.
Now, the product is provided as:
  • Editing Tools 1.3.3 for uDig 1.2.1
  • Spatial Operations 1.3.1 for uDig 1.2.1
This features are available in uDig Community Updates Site:
http://udig.refractions.net/update/1.2/community

To download the source and binary distributions, visit our download page in www.axios.es.

Wednesday, February 2, 2011

uDig 1.2.1 Released

We have recently released uDig 1.2.1. This is an incremental update with mainly bug fixes but there are a few notable features added as well.

  • Additional style editor pages; thanks to the JGrass project and Hydrologis
  • Access to the latest GeoTools renderer with support for hatch patterns
  • Access to world+image "bmp" files
  • Experimental - WMS 1.3.0 support
  • Updated "submit log" in the help menu
Additional documentation:

  • Updated online help capturing the new style pages style pages
  • Updated intro documentation for users and developers

For developers:

  • We have migrated to a new git repository http://gitorious.org/udig
  • Access to the latest GeoTools 2.7 Release Candidate

The new release can be accessed and downloaded from http://udig.refractions.net/download/


Wednesday, January 5, 2011

Upcoming uDig Training

LISAsoft is pleased to announce two uDig training courses in the Australian market:

  • Sydney Jan 31st to Feb 2nd
  • Melbourne Feb 7th to 9th
LISAsoft has updated the uDig training course to cover the latest 1.2.1 release including an early preview of GeoTools 2.7.

This is a world renowned course now in its fifth year. The uDig training course is highly recommended for development teams new to uDig, Eclipse RCP or Geospatial development. The courses packs a punch at 5 days, split between the introductory 3-day course and an advanced 2-day course later in the year, covering everything from disk to screen. Material is well paced providing a gradual introduction with advanced exercises to test your knowledge or explore new areas in depth.

For more information or contact information please see:
http://www.lisasoft.com/Registration

Is Australia too far away? Would you prefer an on-site course customised for your development team? The uDig training course is available from supporting organisations in North America, Europe and Australia. Please contact a PMC member in your area for details.