The jgrasstools 0.7.3 are out!

Really not much more to say here.

Some users needed an updated version of OMS3 and we had enough fixes and new experimental modules to share, so we rolled 0.7.3 out.

As usual this has been tested with uDig's Spatial Toolbox.

This amazing Geo2011 has come to an end. Welcoming Geo2012!

It has been a while I didn't write here, but we have been very busy in bringing it on with our community projects.

Thanks to Lisasoft and the restless Jody Garnett uDig got a whole pile of new features and will be growing nicely over the next year.

Thanks to us, we now finally have a stable Spatial Toolbox in uDig, which for now bases on the JGrasstools project, but is extensible through the OMS3 model linking technology.

Also the cooperation we had with the Colorado State University and the USDA on OMS3 has been amazing and could be summarized in this presentation.

Also on the mobile side a lot has been going on. In the last months Geopaparazzi could welcome a new contributor, Luca Delucchi, which is an active member of the Openstreetmap community. Sharing a train travel together when returning from the Italian GFOSS conference, it happened that we lost the train and started to talk about how we could make geopaparazzi a better tool for OSM members. Well, we didn't just talk and sure thing one of the most important features that will get out with geopaparazzi 2.6 (we are testing those right now) is the support for OSM points.

The map view now presents an OSM logo handle on the right side, and when opened it shows the supported OSM categories:

By selecting a category you gain access to the supported tags:

The tags description generates the form:

Once the form is saved the OSM point is in the database.

The OSM points can then be synchronized with the online OSM account of the user. I really have been waiting for that a long while :)

Another small addition is the enhancement of the profile view for gps logs, which now supports real charting and zooming as well as zoom to selection:

A more complete story about geopaparazzi can be found here.

It has been also a great year for our enigneering company, which lead as side product from a cooperation with the university of Trento to the release of the Nettools. I recently gave a presentation about how we use the nettools, so I will leave it to this post and that presentation.

That has more or less been my Geo2011. A great year. I wish you all an even more amazing geo2012. See you around the world, being it in Trieste, Prague or Beijing.

Geopaparazzi 2.5.0 is out

We just released Geopaparazzi 2.5.0 to the market.

The main changes are around images, which now are referenced in the database. That lead also to have a layer showing them in the map.

One thing long wanted was the insertion of the GPS tags in the pictures. So Exif tags are now supported, based on position, elevation (for whatever that means) and azimuth:

The notes workflow has been unified: both from the main and map view a notes view opens with both simple image/text notes and form based notes. Next week at the Italian Osgeo chapter meeting we will talk about how to evolve the form part.

Enjoy!

android manifest permissions filter in the market

I had a hard time making Geopaparazzi appear in the market for my Asus Transformer. I first thought it was a screen size/density problem, but then I had any permission

<supports-screens 
        android:smallScreens="true"
        android:normalScreens="true" 
        android:largeScreens="true"
        android:anyDensity="true" 
        android:resizeable="true">
</supports-screens>

so I tried to play on sdk versions, btu had the same results:

<uses-sdk 
         android:targetSdkVersion="14" 
         android:minSdkVersion="5">
</uses-sdk>

and I read a dozend times through the docs and finally noted the necessary part:

In general, if an application requests hardware-related permissions, Android Market assumes that the application requires the underlying hardware features, even though there might be no corresponding to declarations. Android Market then sets up filtering based on the features implied by the declarations.

Well, as obvious as it sounds, my Asus has no telephony soppurt, and therefore it was not listed because that permission was asked.

Android 2.0 (API 5) brings the possibility to declare optional features:

<uses-feature 
       android:name="android.hardware.telephony"
       android:required="false">
</uses-feature>

That does the trick.

I hope that saves some headache to someone else.

Geopaparazzi 2.4, pouring the beer!

There has been lots going on about geopaparazzi in the last year.

Customizations have been in the fields of disaster management and waste management, find a short description here.

There has been talk about integration with the ODK project.

With the new android based tablets there has been talk to get more features from BeeGIS into Geopaparazzi to bring the field survey on those new, lightweight, nice cozy, smart devices.

Our (HydroloGIS) objective has been to release the project as free in the market (it has been free and open source from the very start) once we had the money in we needed to buy the book to learn android development. Well, we got more, we got to develop customizations and it is about time that we finally release it free in the market.

So it is official, Geopaparazzi is now not only free as in speach, but also as in beer!

We would like to express our gratitude to all those that supported us through the buying of the application!

We also hope this will attract developers to contribute to the project.

Cheers!

HyUml apps for yUML

Woa... it has been a busy time and my posting force has really dropped. There are a lot of news in the jgrasstools, uDig and open source world to tell about, but for now I will just announce this (I do not need my brain to write about certain things).

I recently got in need to be able to do some design on the road on an android tablet. So I started to search in the market and found some apps. They all were posing as gui to the really nice yUML project.
I found that an amazing idea, but the available tools didn't have certain features I felt were necessary:

* to have an editor and uml view aside of each other
* be able to easily load and save files and dump the image to disk
* be on both android and desktop

That is why I started HyUml:

It is already very usable and it is coded in really few time and with no resources, but it serves the purpose and I am having a good time with it. It is obviously open sourced, so maybe you can also make use of it.

Some snaps:

RCP Version:

Well, maybe I should add that in the lower left panel you get the html img tag text that you can put inside a wiki to have the diagram generated there. This is nifty :)


Android version:

While the android version is in the market, the rcp version has to be built as an eclipse application. For thos interested in the source code of the two projects, they are both on bitbucket on the hyuml repository.

Enjoy..

uDig's new tools palatte and options

Not much to say here, it has already been written down in this great post.

Just wanted to let you know.