To this point, I find QGIS to be the best open source alternative to ESRI’s ArcMap product. So I thought I would pass this along.
Today is a big day for GIS users. QGIS 1.8 is out and about. Check out the new features on their website.
A couple features that I like:
- QGIS Browser which should be very familiar to those who’ve used ArcGIS Catalog.
- DBManager which is now no longer a plugin. I’m a big users of it so this should be very nice.
- New plugin repository! I’m always amazed at how many plugins there are available.
- Microsoft SQL Server support.
- Expression based labeling (YES!)
- support for Zip/GZip layers
I’ve already downloaded mine from KyngChaos.
I just updated QGIS to 1.8 via the OSGeo4W Installer (http://hub.qgis.org/projects/quantum-gis/wiki/Download) at home and these improvements are great! (Please – everyone – remember to get your IT staff’s approval before installing anything at work!)
We were told at a recent Open Source GIS Workshop that QGIS receives the most developer attention, evolving faster than most other projects.
I really appreciate this good news!