Shaping the future after 20 years of HydroloGIS

Exactly 20 years ago, Silvia and I started a tiny little company called HydroloGIS. We knew it had to be about creating tools for environmental engineering, and that everything we would do had to be free and open source software and knowledge. And that is what we have been doing for the last 20 years. 10 years ago I wrote a long post about how no one believed we would make it, what we were able to accomplish, and how our drive to continue for another decade was strong.

Today, with a little tear in my eye, I am here to announce that after 20 years, Silvia and I have decided to close down HydroloGIS for good and continue with our freelance consulting positions. This obviously sounds sad and bad, but actually it is not as bad as it sounds. We have always been geospatial experts and the bureaucratic overhead of the company just does not make sense for us anymore. 

In addition, over the years we have developed interests outside of the core business of the company. In addition to geospatial development for engineering, I still enjoy working with Arduino, have a deep love for 3D modeling and printing, laser cutting, and all those nice technical things that allow you to learn something new every week these days.

And as the wind of change blows, another big change comes with the fact that after almost 10 years I am quitting my teaching activities at the Free University of Bozen/Bolzano. In fact, I already resigned from one of the courses last year and will give my last exams in Advanced Geomatics next week. I have always been an advocate of learning to code early to shape your mind to problem solving and STEM and I saw how much today's university students miss this and have huge problems to learn it at the age of around 25. On the other hand, I saw how quickly my 6 and 8 year old kids learned it by playing. So probably one thing I will look into (well' I kind of already did) are Coder Dojos.

So what's next? Not much to say. I will be doing much the same as before. 

I will be available at my Giant (or G-Ant or Geo-Antonello if you prefer) website. There you can see what I have done and what I am working on. If you need my services, just drop me an email. Mainly I love to develop on free and open source geospatial and to teach geospatial scripting, be it with geoscript or pyQGIS.

Silvia has not yet decided for her own brand, but will still be available under the HydroloGIS umbrella. Even if the company closes down, we will keep the brand alive to represent the joint projects we are still doing (a lot). She will still be doing hardcore hydrologic-hydraulic modeling and GIS power user projects.

Thanks to all of you who have believed in the noble cause that HydroloGIS has represented all these years. We love you.

SMASH 1.8 is out!

Dear all, it has been a while, but some stuff has been going on in the SMASH community. And we now have a new release. So let's have a look at what is new.

We farewell the play store

It is a while we have additional work to do and are loosing usability in SMASH due to the restrictions imposed by the google store. The most impacting has sure been the fact to not be able to access the phone memory freely. And asking google permission to do so didn't work out, since it seems that only file browsers applications and antivirus need to access the memory freely.

With the help of the F-Droid community (special thanks to IzzySoft, Linsu and Licaon-kter) we have been able to make our second appearance on the f-Droid store. And that is now enough to completely migrate there. So we made a last release of SMASH for the store today, but it will be the last one. Please from now on come and get SMASH from the F-Droid store, where the real open source apps live.

Flutter map

We finally made an upgrade of flutter_map, the map widget library used. This took so long, because the architecture of the library had changed and took some rework inside SMASH.

And now on to the new features:

Geometries inside forms

One nice addition that we have to thank Luca Delucchi and the Digiagriapp for is the possibility to insert inside of complex notes.

 

URL based forms combos

It is now possible to insert in forms URLs to substitute long item lists in comboboxes (dropdown lists). This allows forms to be smaller in case of large amounts of items and also to be more dynamic.

Gejson layer support

Geojson is now one of the supported formats in read and write mode (together with geopackage and postgis). It can be used in combination with sld styling as for the other vector formats.

More efficient toolbar

The toolbar has been redone with more usability in mind.

Editing is done on a sidebar now:

and in the settings it is possible to remove unused buttons:

leads to:

 

 Other tiny things that might be worth telling

• now the default behavior of tile maps is to zoom beyond the max zoom level by scaling (no more white emptiness)
• the current log panel has now 3 sizes for better overlay on map
• the info tool is now a box selection tool and as such way more usable
• online sources have been reworked to have the possibility to add and remove from the default. Also the default maps have been reviewed to ensure they are working
• feature info now also presents the length and area of the geometry as derived value
• we did many many bugfixes

One last thing to add. SMASH 1.8 already presents the possibility to import layers from the new GSS server. This is still in testing mode and ongoing work with the Region Piemonte and not yet disseminated as such. Just to give an idea, it will be possible to generate database tables on the server based on form definitions and download the tables as layers from the GSS and sync them two-ways. Also it will allow for point, line and polygon geometries. All in all it will be an alternative way to take notes, still using the form system and having a way to synchronize data to teh central server instance. But well, this will probably be the next story to tell, once testing is done.

Enjoy!!