1.1.2 is the second bug-fix release and minor feature release for version 1.1 of Cartographica and contains essential fixes for all current 1.1 users.

Upgrade using Check for Updates... in the Cartographica menu inside of the program, or download directly from the Cartographica web site

The primary focus of 1.1.2 is to fix certain bugs in the 1.1 release. We have also added some features (mostly UI changes) since the last version due to input from users and ease-of-use concerns, especially with the Map Layout window.

Of particular importance were a bug in the 10.5 code for handling selection and editing which caused information to come up in the wrong place on the screen, a printing problem from the standard map view that would cause a blank page to be printed, and a bug in our undo handling code for the Map Layout that caused Map Layout editing to be fragile (even if you were not using Undo directly).

In the Map Layout UI, we have now added a tool bar and you can now add new items to the Map Layout window by clicking on the relevant tool in the tool bar and then dragging a new box in the window. We hope this will improve the workflow substantially. Note: for Scale, Legend, and Compass, you must have a map selected at the time you create the new element for it to show up correctly.

We have also made a number of performance and stability fixes in this release.

This is the last planned release before version 1.2, the next feature release. Version 1.2 will require Snow Leopard and will be Intel only. Clearly, we will release a 1.1.3 as necessary to fix critical bugs in 1.1.2 prior to the release of 1.2. For more information on the 1.2 transition and information on the 1.2 beta program once it begins, please watch our blog.

Map Layout Changes

• Add drag-to-create in Map Layout window
• Add toolbar to Map Layout window
• Add delete item to contextual menu in Map Layout View

Other Changes

• Numeric data being joined with numeric data that is typed as text will now correctly join
• Speed up drawing of very large, unfiltered layers
• Dramatic speedup in Kernel Density analysis. Normal KDM now 10-100x faster
• Significantly improve performance of zooming and style change redraws
• Significant speed boost when creating polygon unions with large # of polys (up to 100x for very large groups of polygons)
• Add support for GH625
• Add support for keyboard navigation around points in edit mode. Hold Alt/Option to move through the points using the right arrow (clockwise) and left arrow (counter clockwise). Hold shift and Alt/Option to extend the selection in each direction as above.
• Change OSGB to use correct datum for export translations
• Remove Map tooltip as it interferes with display of data tooltips

These have all been re-recored and revised for Version 1.1 using a new set of data from the District of Columbia.

Check out our new Screencast on Map Layout.

Check it out at MacGIS.com.

1.1.1 is the first bug-fix release and minor feature release for version 1.1 of Cartographica and contains essential fixes for all current 1.1 users.

Upgrade using Check for Updates... in the Cartographica menu inside of the program, or download directly from the Cartographica web site

Major changes

Editing

We've implemented a Merge Selected Features command, allowing you to join geometries. This will work best for overlapping geometries, as they will result in a single part. If the parts are discontiguous (even if in a very small way), then they will be considered separate parts and you will end up with a multi-part geometry.

Selecting

We've made a change to selecting in order to make it easier to select features in high density areas. With version 1.1.1, if you hold down the Option (Alt) key, selections will be made only for items that are completely enclosed by the selection rectangle. Otherwise, as with all previous versions of Cartographica, all intersecting features will be selected.

User Interface

Changes too numerous to mention have been made to the UI. Many of these changes are subtle and help to make the UI more uniform, some are small features in themselves (like Zoom to Natural Fit for images).
Updates

Users who use Developmental or Beta versions will be pestered to temporarily change their software update to alert them on new Beta or Development versions (depending on what they're running). The purpose of this is to make sure that fixes to any significant bugs that exist in the Beta or Development versions are moved out to the field as quickly as possible.

Australian Datum

1.1.1 introduces support for grids, projections, and datum specifications for the most requested coordinate reference systems for Australia, including AGD66 and AGD84. This includes not only projection information, but also grid shifts, based on the published government information.

ClueTrust is pleased to announce the immediate availability of Cartographica 1.1 from our download site. There are a lot of features, tweaks, and bug fixes in this version and if you haven't tried Cartographica in a while, it's well worth a test drive again.

For those who have previously tested Cartographica, but whose keys have expired, we have activated new keys. Please use the Lost Key form to get a link to your new key sent to you via email.

If you haven't tried Cartographica yet, just go to our Sign Up page and request a key.

For further information, please view our Release Notes

1.1 will be the last major release to support the PowerPC and Leopard, all new feature development will be Intel-only and will require Snow Leopard.

Major changes

Big Raster File support

The 1.0 version of Cartographica worked well with small raster files (such as those for an area that you might download via WMS), but generally didn't deal well in terms of performance with very large files (5000x5000 pixels or greater). This version removes those limitations and has been tested with files over 5GB in size.

We have also introduced a dedicated layer style window for raster layers that shows the current color palette and provides both a well to drop new palettes on and a way to describe the range for the color palette selected. This is particularly useful for data rasters, such as DEM, which contain floating-point or integer information instead of colors at each point.

Along with this, we've made it so that two raster datasets (images or sampled data) that are placed in the same layer (use the Merge Layers function to do this after selecting the 2+ layers) use the same palette over the same range. In automatic mode, the range is the range of all images in the set. In manual mode, the range is determined by the user.

Editing

We've implemented a Merge Selected Features command, allowing you to join geometries. This will work best for overlapping geometries, as they will result in a single part. If the parts are discontiguous (even if in a very small way), then they will be considered separate parts and you will end up with a multi-part geometry.

Selecting

Another significant new feature is selecting from one layer using any other polygonal layer (either a selection therein or the entire contents of the layer). There are two modes for this selection: intersection (features where any point is contained in) and containment (features where all points are contained in the selection area). To use this feature, click on the layer to select with in the Layer Stack and choose Edit > Select On Another Layer.

Exploring

We have also added pop-up information windows. If you hold down the option key while moving over any item in the selected layer, a small window will pop-up with information about the item you are hovering over. What information shows up is dependent on the Layer Info panel. The "name" is determined by the layer's Name Field setting. Other data included is dependent upon checking off information in the field list "pop up" checkbox. This information is also exported to the KML exporter as part of a table in the Description block that shows up when you click on an item.

There have been big changes to our filtering mechanism. Now, if you initiate a filter, you will see a drop-down area at the top of the Map View that contains a much more flexible seach system. And/or and multiple-field data filtering is now possible and easy with this new system. The existing filter box works as a short-cut, translating queries into the new system, which can then be edited.

Coordinate Systems

In the projection panel, we've reorganized the tree view, so that it provides a better browsing experience and have finally put the detail view to work showing the key parameters in available projections.

Thanks to approval by the Canadian authorities, we have incorporated NTv2 support into version 1.1 to provide accurate mapping between NAD27 and NAD83 within Canada.

File/Data import

Vastly improved character set support in all facets of the program's import capabilities. MapInfo data sets now support the 3 supported character sets (WindowsLatin1, MacRoman, and Neutral). Text/Table import supports a variety of character sets, including automatic, UTF-8, WindowsLatin1, and others. If you are using a non UTF-8 character set, it's best to set that when opening the file.

For Table import, we have also expanded control of how Cartographica interprets numbers and dates. Previously, Cartographica assumed that numbers and dates were formatted based on the system settings. Now that can be overridden to support a variety of other date and number formats. Particularly useful if the data set you are using started its life in another part of the world. The Table importer also gains manual and auto-detected header row handling (previously, it always used the first row of the file as the header row), and improved automatic detection of column separators (as well as the ability to specify separators manually).

File import has also been tweaked for speed and better progress information.

KML import has been enhanced to allow importing files that contain multi-geometry layers (previously this would cause an error, leaving the layer partially imported) which now load into one layer for each geometry type.

We have updated our external libraries, including moving to GDAL 1.6.2 (the latest release), which improved support for BNA, GML, NITF, SGI, Tiff, ECW, XPlane. Further, we've made some changes to our code to better handle errors in some of the incorporated libraries, such as JPEG and ECW, that previously would crash with corrupted data.

Due to a change in how we advertise to the system that we know about files, you should now be able to double-click on a lot more GIS file types and have them show up directly in Cartographica (many of them will import into a new map because we can't export to the formats, so keep that in mind when you're editing data). This also means that you are able to drag and drop many more files onto the icon of Cartographica in the dock--which opens the file in a new window. Not to be confused with dragging a file to an existing map document, which imports the layer into the existing document.

Export

Illustrator export has been enhanced to export the current visibility status, so you will see something closer to what you see on the screen when you export it to Illustrator.

KML export has been enhanced to include visibility status of layers (and features, when hidden by style), use of the "pretty name" as the name for exported features (this can be set by changing the Name Field in the Layer Info window). Further, exported KML is "pretty printed" so that it's easier to follow if you are reading it manually. And lastly, fields selected for inclusion in the Pop-up window are automatically exported as the data for the KML description (the box that comes up when you click on a feature in Google Earth).

We have also enhanced the Map exporter to optionally not export invisible layers, thus reducing the file size and complexity when exporting.

Analysis

Calculation of the nearest distance between the points in a point layer and the features in another layer has been added. This can be used to calculate nearest neighbor to objects in the same layer or nearest distance to points, lines, or edges of polygons. Note that distance to polygons does not treat specially the case of being "inside" of a polygon. So, if your point is 5 meters inside of a polygon, the distance will be 5 meters from the polygon, just as it would be if the point were 5 meters outside of the polygon.

Kernel Density maps have been enhanced with the introduction of 5 new Kernel types: Quartic (or spherical), Exponential (Negative), Triangular (Conic), Uniform (Flat), Paraboloid/quadratic (Epanechnikov) in addition ot the Normal (Gaussian) kernel that had been supported in previous versions. Some of these kernels are quite a bit faster, owing to their ignoring points outside of their bandwidth(h).

Geocoding

Cartographica now supports Tiger/Line Shapefiles (those produced by the Census bureau after 2006) for Geocoding. To use these files, go to the Bureau's site and download the "All Edges" shapefile and then follow the usual instructions for geocoding. Specifics are detailed in our Knowledgebase article, Geocoding with TIGER/Line Shapefiles

Map Layout

Map Layout now has a simple Compass layout function. This provides an arrow, with optional text at either a manually-specified angle, or an angle that is computed by Cartographica. When using automatic, take care that you spot check it for validity, as it is a complex calculation. As with other text-containing pieces of Map Layout, you can also change style and text.

The scale box has also received some new options. Units can be controlled and the scale itself may be restricted to a fixed size (in units) or tracks the size of the box. If you're using the fixed unit size and the box is too small, units are reduced by a factor of 2 until it does fit in the box.

Scripting

AppleScript scripting has been thoroughly re-tested and is working well again (it had been broken in the development release to date due to some structural changes).

User Interface

Changes too numerous to mention have been made to the UI. Many of these changes are subtle and help to make the UI more uniform, some are small features in themselves (like Zoom to Natural Fit for images).

We have also created new icons for most documents, including adding a specific icon for the raster formats that we support.

Updates

For those interested in living on the "wild side", the Preferences panel now allows you to be prompted about newly available updates in the development and beta branches as well as the final releases. Release versions have been thoroughly tested, which isn't the case with either beta or development versions, so please be careful when using these. We try to test as much as possible between versions, but bugs sometimes get through, so back up your data when working with these versions (frankly, back it up anyway, that's what Time Machine is for!).

Significant bug fixes

1.1 contains a number of significant bug fixes for bugs that affected some users regularly. Unfortunately, the few common ones were difficult to track down and could not be immediately patched into the 1.0 codeline, so work-arounds needed to be used until 1.1.

There has been a long-standing bug in mapsets saved with references to multi-layer imagery files. This could cause significant problems, especially if the mapset is loaded and saved multiple times. To resolve this problem, it will be necessary to remove the existing image reference layers and re-import them.

We have also fixed a variety of undo-related bugs in Map Layout and enhanced the Map Layout undo titles to be more representative (there shouldn't be any more unqualified "Undo" menu items any more, so please note these if you find them).

As part of the beta program, we've reactivated keys for everyone who has signed up to try Cartographica in the past and we hope that everyone will take advantage of the opportunity to try out our new features and changes. We believe this is a great step forward for Cartographica and GIS on the Macintosh.

After the release of 1.1, we won't be dawdling, there's a lot of work to do for the next versions of Cartographica, which will require Snow Leopard (1.1 is the last feature release to support Leopard and PowerPC Macintoshes), so help us get there by giving Cartographica 1.1 beta a whirl.

For those who have previously tested Cartographica, but whose keys have expired, we have activated new keys. Please use the Lost Key form to get a link to your new key sent to you via email.

If you haven't tried Cartographica yet, just go to our Sign Up page and request a key.

Release notes which detail the changes in 1.1 are available online.

During the WWDC week in June, we had a chance to peek at the future of Apple's OS and have made some decisions about how Cartographica will evolve.

Please read the Snow Leopard and Future of Cartographica announcement to get the full picture.

The short summary is that we will be discontinuing new feature support of 10.5 after the 1.1 release this summer (which will also be the last feature release for PPC).

Based on our information about our current users, we believe this is the right way to leverage our resources and create the best GIS we can for the Macintosh. By taking advantage of advanced features in Snow Leopard as soon as they are available, we will be able to move much more quickly on future feature updates and performance enhancements

Cartographica is the first Cocoa-native Macintosh GIS program and comes complete with all necessary basic functionality for use as a GIS in applications including:

• Data Analysis
• Geospatial Visualization
• Map making

However, we're not stopping here. There's a lot more functionality to be added as Cartographica evolves and we are looking forward to providing existing users with more functionality and welcoming new users into the fold as we expand the analysis and other functions.

Please visit our dedicated website for more details!

PR4 adds a large list of fixes and tweaks and includes Buffering of features for the first time. If you haven't been trying the intermediate releases, you'll also enjoy:

• Enhanced ODBC compatibility
• Map coverage controls in WMS requests
• Speed increases for many parts of the software, including the table importer
• Raster plane merging (useful for people using raw Landsat data
• And many fixes...

Thank you for participating in the testing of Cartographica.

The forums will hopefully provide a place for users to talk about Cartographica, but are not the place for reporting bugs. That is still at the ClueTrust Bug Report page.

So, check out our Forums and enjoy.

This version, although still an early preview, has a number of new compelling features including:

• Ability to manually edit features using either the mouse or by directly typing in numbers
• Visible scale indicator
• Ability to export maps to KML
• Column heading placement and sizing are remembered
• ECW file format now supported
• and many more bug fixes, interface tweaks, and smaller features

Please check it out!

Thank you!
ClueTrust

Please make sure to go to our web site (via the included Bug Report link) and report any bugs or feature requests you have.

Please take our survey and we will send you information on receiving a discount on the final product.

Thank you!
ClueTrust

ClueTrust is seeking your input on our new Macintosh GIS product, a preview of which will be available November 19th, 2008.

Please take our survey and we will send you information on receiving a discount on the final product.

Thank you!
ClueTrust