Monday, June 4, 2012

Geopaparazzi 3 is out - explained through wiki-links

I learned through the years that jumping up major versions too often is not good. And I applied what I learned. Well, this time I was forced to, I swear. This had to be geopaparazzi 3. No 2.6.2, no 2.7.0. Just 3.

And  to show that to you all, I also upgraded the whole documentation wiki. And since most of the people out there do not even know that there is such an effort, I will make this release based on its entry.

So, let's walk through the changes that this release contains. The first two changes are definitely the most important ones and depend on the fact that we dropped osmand as mapping engine to go with mapsforge. The decision mostly came from the need to work with vector maps, but resulted in some other big advantage.

CUSTOM MAP TILES

It is now possible to load TMS tilesets into geopaparazzi. One can create tilesets from GIS data layers (also with jgrasstools) and load them in geopaparazzi. Tilesets can be in TMS or GOOGLE mode, and both remote or local.

Professionals will be particularly happy with this feature, since one can create maps from the overlay of complex GIS layers, as our small showcase shows.

VECTOR MAPS

Mapsforge works with vector maps. And so does Gaopaparazzi now (obviously). Vector maps are great, because they take much less space than tiles and one is able to carry along the whole map of his nation on the sdcard at each zoom level. That is an amazing feature. Never more missing tiles during your surveys!

Mapsforge generates and maintains a set of standard vector maps. Those guys are really amazing!

Recently the osmandguys started generating vector maps rendering after the opencycle maps.Those maps are great, because they also contain isolines.

OSM TOOLS

The OSM tools god some enhancement, mainly related to the ability to update the osm tags once they are extended on the main website. A tutorial is now available.

BOOKMARKS AND PROXIMITY ALERT

The bookmarks list has finally been enhanced to look a bit nicer. Note that it now gives the possibility to enable certain bookmarks with a proximity alert, which will ring when one get's near the point of interest.

FORMS AND TAGS

The forms part has been enhanced with some new tag, which can be usefull for more complex forms.

IMPORT AND EXPORT

New import and export features have been added. It is now possible to import and export from GPX, export to KMZ, export to some cloudbased service. An utility to import and export bookmarks has been added, which makes it easy to move bookmarks around projects.

CLOUD PROJECTS

Geopaparazzi exposes also a very simple API to load projects into the web and download online projects definitions as well as download actual projects. Currently we have no server to make this public, so you will have to believe in what we wrote here.

TRANSLATIONS

We didn't want to wait any longer to release this version, so we are behind with the translations. We have instructions for potential translators. Please help translating geopaparazzi in your language!

CONNECTIONS TO OTHER SOFTWARE

Until this release only BeeGIS was able to seamlessly import data into a real GIS software to allow further analysis.

Since the GRASS community sprint in Prague there is one new amazing software that is able to import geopaparazzi data. There is no info page available yet, but the module is already usable through the GRASS extensions engine. The module works with GRASS 7.


And that's it for this release. Enjoy|!