Posts by Spatial Galaxy

QGIS Users Around the World

One of the difficult things to track in the open source world is the number of people who actually use your software. In the proprietary commercial world you have licenses, invoices, and so forth. In the case of QGIS, we can track the total number of downloads from qgis.org, but this doesn’t represent the total installed base. It is impossible to accurately determine the actual number of people using QGIS, but we can get an approximation of the number and where they are in the world.
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Using git With Multiple QGIS Branches

This post is for those of you that build QGIS on a regular basis and want to keep up with everything going on in the current release branches (1.7.2 and 1.8) as well as the master branch that will eventually become version 2.0. While you can do all your work in one clone, this method has a couple of advantages, at the expense of a bit of disk space: Quicker compiles compared to branch switching, especially if you are using ccache Less likelihood of making a merge mess when switching branches The basic steps are:
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Using the QGIS Plugin Builder

The Plugin Builder allows you to quickly create a skeleton Python plugin by generating all that boring boilerplate that every plugin requires. Here is a short video showing how to create, compile, and install a new plugin. For more information, see QGIS Workshop Documentation and the PyQGIS Cookbook.
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Search QGIS IRC Logs

I added a simple feature that allows you to search the IRC logs from #qgis back to May 10, 2006. The search is case sensitive and will return a list of all matches. Not too smart but it will get you close to what you want. See the link at http://irclogs.geoapt.com/qgis
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History of QGIS Committers

Using the git log leading up to the 1.7 release (June 2011) I put together a graphic that shows the growth of committers working on the project. In 2002 we had two people (me alone up until October). You can see significant jumps in developer interest in 2004 and 2008: In 2004 there were a number of releases that added significant functionality Following an announcement at FOSS4G 2007 in Victoria we released 0.
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Importing a DBF containing X-Y Values into QGIS

Suppose you have a DBF (.dbf) file containing X and Y values that you want to import and save as a spatial layer. QGIS doesn’t support direct import of a DBF file as a map layer, however, we can use some command line magic to convert it to a CSV file and then use the Delimited Text plugin to get the job done. Your DBF file should have an id for each record and fields containing X and Y values.
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Developing QGIS Plugins with git

Writing a QGIS plugin is not overly complicated but represents a bit of work. Using git in conjunction with your development efforts can make sure your investment in coding time is preserved. Development Tools The QGIS project team has set up a central location for plugin development which includes pretty much everything you need to develop and support your plugins, including: Issue tracking Wiki Documents
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Evolution of QGIS

An interesting visualization of QGIS development over the last eight years: http://woostuff.wordpress.com/2011/01/03/generating-a-gource-source-commit-history-visualization-for-qgis-quantum-gis/
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Contributing to QGIS Using Git

One of the challenges in any open source project is accepting contributions from people that don’t have, need, or want access to your centralized source code repository. Managing repository accounts for occasional or one-time contributors can be come a bit of an administrative issue. To date, the QGIS project has accepted one-time or occasional contributions through patches submitted via a help ticket. To make it easier for you to contribute to QGIS, we have created a clone of the Subversion repository on GitHub.
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GeoApt Spatial Data Browser

This is a project I have had lingering around for a while. It is a geospatial data browser written in Python using the PyQt and QGIS bindings. It allows you to navigate a tree structure and preview raster and vector datasets. Metadata extracted from the data can be viewed as well. It supports drag and drop for any target that accepts filenames (e.g. QGIS). For screenshots and more, see http://geoapt.com/geoapt-data-browser.
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