If you ever need to sort the entries in a shapefile by one of its attributes, you might be happy to learn that somebody already did all the work for you and wrote a plugin for QGIS that can perform such sorting tasks: MMQGIS Sort plugin by Michael Minn
MMQGIS Sort plugin
Today, Alexander Bruy announced a new QGIS plugin called RoadGraph. It is a C++ plugin that calculates the shortest path between two points on any polyline layer (e.g. Openstreetmap shapefiles).
More information can be found at GIS-Lab.
Binary files are available for Windows and Linux:
To make it easier to contribute to QGIS, the team has created a clone of the Subversion repository on GitHub. Using GitHub makes it easy to submit enhancements and bug fixes for inclusion in the Subversion repository. Gary Sherman describes the process in his post “Contributing to QGIS Using Git”.
Another of Gary’s projects is available via GitHub too: GeoApt Spatial Data Browser. It’s a data browser written in Python using QGIS bindings. It allows navigating a tree structure and previewing raster and vector datasets and associated metadata. Another nice feature: It supports drag & drop to e.g. QGIS! The project homepage can be found at: geoapt.com.
Nathan has created an amazing video about 8 years of QGIS development using Gource. Each cluster of files is a directory and the branches show the folder hierarchy:
To find out how he did it, read “Generating a Gource source commit history visualization for QGIS (Quantum GIS)”
The Victorian Department of Sustainability and Environment (DSE) is undertaking a larger trial of QGIS. 38 GIS products were assessed by consulter Spatial Vision. In the end, two Open Source GIS products, gvSIG and QGIS, were presented to DSE stakeholders. Overall, QGIS was rated highest in functionality and usability. — read more
In spring 2011, the Quantum GIS project will hold a QGIS Developer Meeting, aka ‘QGIS Hackfest’ in Lisbon, Portugal. Proposed dates are (both Thursday to Monday):
New symbology has been around for quite a while now, but the last weeks have seen some great new additions to this functionality. Let’s have a look at what can be achieved:
Using ‘Marker Placement’ options in ‘Marker Line’, we can now create fancy arrows pointing in or against line direction.
Arrow style for line layers using 'Marker Lines' and specialized marker placement
Using ‘Marker Line’, we can also create nice looking railway styles. The ‘sleepers’ are created using vertical line markers at certain intervals.
Rail style with 'Marker Line' at certain interval
Besides normal and SVG polygon fill styles, new symbology now offers centroid and outline styles. Outline styles offer all options found in line style dialog (simple, marker and line decoration).
Fun polygon style using fill, outline and centroid layer
QGIS community has developed some interesting new features over the last weeks:
The time of old symbology is running out. It will not be available for QGIS 2.0 anymore, but who will miss it? The development speed of QGIS symbology in the last months has been simply astonishing!
This year, the QGIS community is not writing their wish lists to Santa Claus. This year, we get to send our wishes to kCube!
You will find the wish list on the QGIS Wiki. The page is aimed at collecting ideas for features and tasks that can be assigned to the 6 months of developer time being donated by kCube Consulting. Later, there will be a poll to find the most useful contributions.
Have your say and post your ideas! And don’t hesitate to follow kCube’s example ;)
Free and Open Source GIS Ramblings 