Waiting for QGIS 1.1

27.04.2009 09:47 ·  Notes  ·  qgis

It so happened that I had been following the development of Quantum GIS exclusively from the sidelines for quite some time. I followed the discussions on the mailing lists, had a look from time to time at the forum and the blog, but I did not download new versions and did not play with them. It wasn’t because I had lost interest or the desire to master the program, but because of the chaos at work and the lack of time. There was also no prospect of using the GIS itself or the general knowledge of the technology at work. Of course, it can be argued that “knowledge is not a burden”, “who knows what will happen tomorrow” and so on. But anyway, there was no one around to say all the right things, no one to appeal to my conscience… In the end, everything turned out the way it did.

Probably the passive observation would have continued for a long time, but on one of the freelance sites I received a message with a job offer (later it turned out that I already know the guy, but that is not important), and the work is directly related to my interests: development and GIS. One of the requirements was to use free software. After some research and discussions with the client, I decided to use QGIS and Python.

Compared to the last 0.11 version I saw, the current 1.0 is a HUGE step forward. I was particularly pleased with the topological editing, support for external pyramids for raster data, many other improvements, and a new API that is simple and logical. All this, plus the ease of interface creation, makes QGIS a very promising piece of software. By the way, version 1.1 will be released soon and will add support for SpatiaLite data sources, among other things.

Looking forward for it.