The 9th QGIS developer meeting in Valmiera (Latvia) has come to an end.
Since the QGIS code is already frozen (with some caveats), almost all of the commits were aimed at fixing bugs, improving stability, and shaping the new API.
It’s a thankless task to list everyone by name, there are no idlers at hackfests. I’ll just go through the things that interest me personally (and that affect me to a greater or lesser extent):
Radim continued to improve the raster subsystem (in particular, he fixed a number of problems with the handling of NODATA values)
Jürgen, as always, fixed bug after bug, and also worked on support for different encodings (yes, yes, Frank’s commit to GDAL will have long-lasting consequences)
Borys worked on the new plugin installer
Victor and I worked on SEXTANTE: fixing bugs, writing new tests, updating documentation and help files
Werner, Paolo, Otto, Larissa, Raymond worked on the user manual, cleaning up the wiki and migrating the website
In addition, all hackfest participants were very active in discussing a range of issues:
implementation of GRASS raster algorithms
the documentation creation and translation process
SEXTANTE’s new features and architecture
PSC structure and role
new plugin installer
new website
and other issues
The next developer meeting is scheduled for September (earlier than usual) and will be held in Brighton, UK.
It was a great pleasure to read this book by Dzvinka Matiyash. I recommend it, it’s a wonderful work, written emotionally and, in my opinion, poetically. Even if you don’t like Ukrainian, you should try to read it anyway.
In the meantime, I’ll start reading “Stories of Roses, Rain and Salt”.
I have finished translating the QGIS 1.8.0 User Guide into Russian. Online and PDF versions should be available tomorrow via links on the official website.
Another of my modest contributions to QGIS is now in the master. I added 4 new tools to customise raster rendering: brightness and contrast controls (raster pipes, once you understand how they work, are cool and flexible thing). In addition to changing the raster rendering on the fly, users can also save the modified image for future use.
I read “Notes of a Ukrainian Madman” by Lina Kostenko. Excellent, I didn’t even expect to like it. Now I’m thinking what to read next: “A Requiem for November” by Dzvinka Matiyash or “Raven” by Vasyl Shkliar. But I don’t have either book yet, and it’s unlikely that I could buy them here.
Yesterday I finished “The Idiot” by Dostoyevsky. Impressions are twofold, it was a bit easier to read than “Crime and Punishment”, but in general I did not like it. I haven’t decided what to read next, and I won’t have much time for books in the near future.
Traditionally, at the end of the year, I try to summarise the most important and interesting events.
This year I have had to work hard. In addition to working on various projects, I have been quite active in QGIS, especially at the beginning of the year. In total, more than 50 bugs in QGIS were fixed, and 4 new plugins were released. It looks like next year will be even more intense.
The year was rich in releases: GDAL 1.9.0 (and related shapefile encoding issues), Proj 4.8, QGIS 1.7.4 and 1.8.0, PostGIS 2.0 (topology and raster), OTB 3.12 (full support for Πλειάδες). 181317 OrbView-3 scenes have been released under the Public Domain licence. Also, this year SEXTANTE for QGIS was announced — a powerful geoprocessing platform that soon became part of QGIS.
QGIS is now 10 years old.
I released several new QGIS plugins, including Geotag and import photos, and participated in GSoC as a mentor. For a short time I became a SEXTANTE core developer (then it was integrated into QGIS and I lost that title).
TauDEM (Terrain Analysis Using Digital Elevation Models) is a set of Digital Elevation Model (DEM) tools for extracting and analysing hydrological information from the topography represented by a DEM. It was developed at Utah State University (USU) for hydrological analysis of digital elevation models and watershed delineation.
TauDEM has recently been integrated into QGIS as a SEXTANTE provider. This makes it possible to run TauDEM tools directly from QGIS, easily perform complex analysis workflows, and view the generated results.
In this post, I will show how to perform some hydrological analysis tasks in QGIS using TauDEM, namely how to delineate watersheds and extract stream networks.
About a week ago, Alessandro Furieri announced the release of SpatiaLite 4.0.0 — a spatial extension to SQLite. There are not just a lot of changes, there are VERY many of them. And some of them may cause compatibility problems, so all users should read the migration guide.
Among the most interesting features:
tessellation support
VirtualOGR driver
support for SQL/MM topology
and more
And yesterday, the SpatiaLite data provider in QGIS was updated. Compatibility with databases created in previous versions of SpatiaLite is maintained. However, you will need to convert your databases to the SpatiaLite 4.0.0 format (you can use spatialite_convert from spatialite-tools) to take full advantage of the new features.