Get fieldwork smoothly and nimbly done despite the ice and snow outside. Collect accurate data with freehand digitizing and improved form widgets, use the data from your external GNSS receivers without any third-party apps and enjoy the pleasant usability of QField 1.8 Selma.

This year started off hi-speed for us. There’s been already a lot of coding, designing and teaching, and we’ve thrown ourselves into these things we love to do. And we published another QField release last week that I completely forgot to announce in this blog. But here it is. It’s QField 1.8, Selma. And it’s packed with cool features.

Let’s have a look.

Freehand drawing

This might be a feature that brings a lot of fun and professionalism to your work. The freehand digitizing mode allows the user to “draw” lines and polygons with the stylus pen. The mode is available for adding line/polygon features as well as for the ring tool of the geometry editor.

Together with the powerful options in the topological editing where you can snap to existing features and avoid overlaps, it’s very convenient to digitize complex shapes.

Zoom in and out

Speaking of fun. One day, a guy from the QGIS community asked us if we could implement the functionality to zoom in and zoom out like he is able to do with an app called Maps from a company named Google. I didn’t know what he meant, but he explained: Single finger double tap-and-hold zoom gesture (which allows you to zoom smoothly from anywhere on the screen). Wow! Didn’t know it before, but it’s super neat! So we made it available in QField as well.

If you are used to it, it’s quite easy. But for beginners it can be a bit difficult. So for people who are not that deft – and to keep the UX self-explanatory and simple – we also added two buttons + / – to zoom in and zoom out with just one finger. So now even a clumsy pirate with a hook instead of a hand can collect data with QField

Powerful Relation Reference Widget

Let’s be a little bit more serious and talk about how powerful the relation reference widget has become.

View and Edit selected feature

The intuitive eye icon next to the widget lets you open the form of the referenced parent feature to view and edit it.

Autocomplete mode

When auto-complete is enabled, you can easily perform a search in all available parent features.

With space-separated input, you can search for the beginning of multiple words in the display name of the parent features. So in this example searching for “Ma” will find the name “Mae” and “Marie” and using the second word “buck” it finds the Buckfast bees – so the entries containing both values will be listed on top.

Integration of external GNSS receivers

In case you wondered, why we did not release 1.8 Selma earlier? Because we wanted to have it feature loaded and rocket proof. And one of this cool feature is the integration of external GNSS receivers.

QField can receive and decode NMEA sentences received via Bluetooth from an external GNSS receiver (such as an EMLID Reach RS2) without the need for any third party app.

Search for paired Bluetooth devices in the device settings, connect to the external device and receive the GNSS information.

Select vertical grid shift files

In the QField settings, you can select a grid file on your mobile device by placing it in a directory named QField/proj in the main folder of the internal storage to increase the vertical location accuracy.

Postgres Config File

If you once started using PostgreSQL configuration files, you don’t want to live without them anymore. And when you use it on your PC, I’m sure you want to use it on your mobile device as well.

Define Postgresql services in a pg_service.conf file and use it on QField by placing it directly in a directory named QField in the main folder of the internal storage.

Add reload data button

The layer properties have been polished and in addition, you will find a button to reload the layer data. This is especially useful if you use WFS layers from which you need to get updates.

Register extra fonts

Also, you can add TTF and OTF font files into a directory named QField/fonts at the main folder of the internal storage to use the nice fonts you like.

How beautiful is that!

Support of new raster file formats

By the way: Many new raster file formats are supported – most notably COG. While not yet supported as remote format streamed directly from the web, it is also a high performance format if used locally

What about the cloud?

You might be one of these people eagerly waiting and always receiving the same message: Keep calm, it’s coming soon. Sorry for that. But when we do something, we do it right. And we prefer to have a stable solution than to publish half baked stuff. We are still highly busy coding, testing and promoting QFieldCloud. It’s announced for this spring / early summer.

Also, keep an eye on the @QFieldForQgis and @QFieldCloud twitter accounts to stay updated.

We our Beta Testers

The Beta Testers are our secret heroes. They report bugs and inconveniences before the normal users are bothered with them. Thanks to the Beta Testers QField is so stable. And at this point we would like to say: Thank you, test heroes!

And what do the beta testers get in return? Well, they can be the very first to try out the great new features. This is exciting and fun. So don’t hesitate. Join the beta.

In the Play Store you should find this section under the “QField for QGIS” app listing. Enjoy the feature frenzy and report the problems at qfield.org/issues

And if you wondered…

… why this release is called “Selma”. It’s of course because of the Mount Selma in Australia… And because it’s the name of my beloved cat. That’s her – Selma Eulenkopf – staring at me while I’m coding QField.

Be ready for the cold weather with a smooth coordinate search, filters in the value relation widget, fancy new QML and HTML widgets, enhanced geometry editing functionalities and an expandable legend. Right when Autumn starts, QField 1.7 Rockies hits the stage.

As usual get it now on the play store or on github!

The days are getting shorter and the wind blows colder. It’s always good to be in a good company outside while getting your mapping work done. QField will be your reliable companion.

We know, QField 1.6 Qinling has only been out two months and with its amount of new features and stability improvements, it would have deserved a longer primetime. But we just couldn’t withhold you all the new great stuff we’ve been building lately.

So let’s welcome QField 1.7 Rockies. And yes, we mean THE Rockies, where QField is looking for plenty of new buddies.

Let’s have a look.

Merging features

Splitting of a feature has been possible for quite some time. Now the merging of features of multipolygon-layer is possible as well. Select them and merge them – easy like that. The first selected feature gets the new geometry and keeps its attributes.

Filters in the Value Relation Widget

The value relation widgets provide an easy selection of a related feature. Often it’s used for lookup tables but sometimes the related tables contain a lot of entries and the list of the possible values is long.

Using filters in the value relation drop-down can increase the efficiency in selecting the correct value. It can be configured by expressions in QGIS, so it’s possible to have the content of the drop down depend on the values entered previously in other fields.

In the screenshot above there is a Map Value Widget with “forest” and “meadow” as values. On selecting “forest”, only the trees appear in the Field “Plant Species”. On selecting “meadow” there would be listed flowers instead.

Go to coordinates in the Search

The search has not only been improved in its appearance, but it’s handling is much more comfortable with a button to clear the text and easy opening and closing.

Additionally, we added the possibility to jump to coordinates. Searching a place you know the coordinates of is now super simple. And this means that digitizing that precise geometry with known coordinates is finally possible.

QML and HTML Widget

You might remember when we introduced the QML widget in QGIS. Now it’s in QField as well. And it’s not alone. HTML widgets are supported too.

This provides a lot of possibilities to display information with texts, images and charts and it even allows you interaction.
Do you need help setting up complex forms? Don’t hesitate to get in touch with us!

Expandable legend icons

The legend items are now expandable and collapsible.

Wait a minute… Wasn’t this possible before? Yes. It was possible in earlier versions. But why it’s announced here as a new feature?

Because now it is built in a future proof manner thanks to all the people and organisations who care for QField and bought a support contract with the sustainability initiative or committed to a recurring sponsorship.

Some technical background: As you may be aware QField uses QGIS under the hood and QGIS uses Qt under the hood. Qt is currently used in version 5. Qt 5 is not that young any more and has a lot of functionality which is no longer supported by Qt. The old legend was based on the tree view, a deprecated module. Using it had some implications like the suboptimal support of HiDPI. Furthermore, these deprecated modules will disappear in the soon-to-come Qt 6.

As you can see, keeping QField at the quality we and you expect requires a lot of maintenance work. It is of utmost importance and only possible thanks to sponsoring since paying for fixing already existing features is less attractive for most people.

What will the future bring

In the last weeks, we have been highly busy on coding, testing and promoting QFieldCloud and we are very happy to be able to announce it very soon. So be prepared.

Also, keep an eye on the @QFieldForQgis and @QFieldCloud twitter accounts to stay updated.

Open Source

QField is an open source project. This means that whatever is produced is available free of charge. To anyone. Forever. This also means that everyone has the chance to contribute. You can write code, but you don’t need to. You can also help translating the app to your language or help out writing documentation or case studies or by sponsoring a new feature.

And now…

… enjoy QField 1.7 Rockies and have a nice autumn!

Editing multiple features at the same time, support for stylus pens, dynamic configuration of image names and much more.
QField 1.6 Qinling 秦岭 comes packed with awesome new features and an improved user experience.

We have been very busy over the last few months working on a new and shiny QField release. We have added many new features that increase efficiency on the field or allow for new workflows. In parallel, we have also been working on ironing out a series of issues and improving the overall user experience to make the app as pleasurable to use as possible. The result is QField 1.6 which has been published now.

Enough of the highlevel talking, let’s see what has been done.

Multi editing

Do you recall Geography lesson 101, Toblers first law? Everything is related to everything else. But near things are more related than distant things.

Very often there are similar objects nearby which share a property, tree species tend to group, human created objects like street light types or street paint markings tend to be of the same type at the same location.

With QField 1.6 it is now much easier to select a couple of features and change an attribute with very few taps. Identify a feature, long press an identify results, select more features and click the edit attributes button.

Stylus support

Sometimes it is just too cold to be working with fingers (although of course you can get capacitive gloves too). Or you just prefer to be working with a pen. QField 1.6 comes with support for stylus pens. If your device ships with one, give it a try.

Lock geometries

For some scenarios, especially in asset management, you only need to change attributes of existing objects and never add new features, delete features or change geometries. This can be configured through QFieldSync and set in the layer properties.

Image name configuration

Did you ever want to have the file names of your pictures to match the feature id, the layer name or any free text? The expression based configuration in QFieldSync offers now complete freedom in naming your images.

Legend and UX and legacy code

Didn’t expect to read UX and legacy code in one single title?

QML is the technology on which the QField user interface is built. QML ships a lot of user interface elements in a library called “Quick Controls”. A long time ago already it received an update from version 1 to version 2. Up to recently we still have been using some elements from version 1, which had an effect on high resolution displays not being able to properly display everything. To workaround that we introduced a lot of band aids, to improve the situation. We are very happy, that by migrating the legend and few other remaining elements to Quick Controls 2 in version 1.6, we have been able to completely drop this code.

Topological editing

QGIS can detect shared boundary by the features, so you only have to move a common vertex once, and QGIS will take care of updating the neighboring ones. So does his little college QField since this release.

Fast editing mode

For the real adventurers who know what they are doing this release brings the fast editing mode. In this mode, the features will automatically be stored on every change. The user interface is lighter and it combines perfectly with the topological editing.

Unter the hood

We have brought the whole technology stack up to speed with modern requirements. Proj and GDAL have been updated to recent versions. This helped to mitigate a couple of issues with coordinate transformations that were completely misplaced. It also paves the path for a future with datum corrections and always more important high precision measurements.

Known Issues

Unfortunately, we are experiencing a crash on startup with 32 bit devices. These devices are not that common any more, but if you have a device that is already a couple of years old it’s very well possible that it comes with a 32 bit cpu builtin. Despite the team’s hard efforts to isolate the reason, we were not able to find out what it was yet. Because of this we will not be able to update to 1.6 for these devices at the moment. We still hope that we will find a solution for this but don’t know yet when this will be.

We have updated proj to version 6. This brings plenty of bug fixes with coordinate handling. Among other things it adds support for using datum grids (gsb files) for very precise transformations, it is not yet possible to install those on the device. You will get an information message in the about dialog if your project happens to fall into this category. In this case, as a workaround switch the CRS of the project to a CRS with a known conversion that works without grid files.

What will the future bring

You guessed it already, we are not tired and have plenty of things stacked for the future. Prepare for more exciting updates for attribute forms and also for QFieldCloud which is right now being tested in our R&D labs.

Also keep an eye on the @QFieldForQgis Twitter account to stay updated.

Open Source

QField is an open source project. This means that whatever is produced is available free of charge. To anyone. Forever. This also means that everyone has the chance to contribute. You can write code, but you don’t need to. You can also help translating the app to your language or help out writing documentation or case studies or by sponsoring a new feature.

Thanks to sponsors

Various organisations have helped to make this new release become a reality. Without the support of people in organisations who believe in the future of QField and open source tool for geospatial in general. The whole team behind QField would like to thank you with a big applause!

A huge success

At the end of 2019, we organised the first QField user day in Bern. Around 40 participants from Switzerland and neighbouring countries joined the packed event with use case presentations by various power users of QField.

Fantastic use-case presentations

After a brief introduction by Matthias, Samuel Wechsler from the Swiss Ornithological Institute showed how they make their teams fly with QField to be more effective in protecting the Swiss bird fauna and its habitat. Next on the podium was one of the earliest QField pioneers, Daniel Gnerre from the city of Vevey telling the audience how the city thoroughly uses QField to collect and update data on just about anything and how they integrated QField in their geospatial infrastructure.

After a short break, Philipp Eigenmann showed us how he uses QField to manage the forest he and his team are responsible for. Finally, Samuel Oester and Till Weber from Oester Messtechnik presented Gasbusters – Chasing gas with QField explaining how they used QField in over 200 soil gas leaks campaigns measuring over 39’000 points to be then visualised on maps and with Grafana.

You can find all the slides and some videos of the presentations online.

Open discussion

A user day wouldn’t be a user day if there was no space for discussion. After the fantastic presentations, we launched an open discussion on the future of QField and how to sustainably maintain its growth rate and quality thanks to [financially] committed users. The discussion showed us a lot of willingness and commitment to help QField keep its incredible innovation level and its market leader position as reference GIS fieldwork app. This obviously gave us a lot of ideas and motivation and made us enjoy the closing beers even more

We would like to extend again a warm thank you to all the speakers and participants. We’re definitely looking forward to the next QField user day!

What’s next?

On 11.03.2020, just before the QGIS hackfest in Den Bosch (NL), we’ll lead a full-day workshop in the awesome GeoFort. Don’t worry, the workshop will be in English.

QField is growing steadily, plenty of new features (including native cloud synchronisation) are planned with the next releases of QField. We’d like to thank again all organisations, companies and individuals that actively use QField and that invest in making QField even better.

If you feel QField misses something you need or would like to support the project, don’t hesitate to get in touch with us.

What a year’s start! After a very packed December publishing all the QGIS on the road videos and quietly releasing QField 1.3 – Ben Nevis we could have gone and relaxed over the holidays. But since we love QField so much we immediately started working on the next iteration. Now, after an intensive testing period, we are proud to announce the release of QField 1.4 – Olavtoppen.

Olavtoppen!? yes, the highest point of Bouvet Island, the remotest island on Earth. And sure enough, QField would follow you there!

As usual, get it on play store or download it from GitHub.

QField Crowdfunding Campaign

Before digging into all the new goodness that you will find in QField 1.4, let’s get a big “Thanks” out to everybody who supported our crowdfunding campaign for improved camera support and all our customers that agreed to open source the work we did for them.

If you like QField, want a new feature or would like to support the project, don’t hesitate to get in touch with us.

Usability enhancements

In QField 1.2 we started to improve on the usability of the user interface. We are constantly working on this with a usability expert to get the user interface to be even more appealing and user-friendly.

Besides lots of clean-up and polishing, QField received two major improvements, a portrait mode and a new welcome screen with recent projects.

Welcome screen with recent projects

QField is all about efficiency. While favourites folders in the file selector already give a great productivity boost, very often we work with the same 3-4 projects. This is why we redesigned the welcome screen to list the last five project used. And if you look carefully you might get a hint of what will be coming soon…

Portrait mode

QField now flawlessly works in portrait mode. We heard you say you needed a comfortable way to work in portrait mode, especially on smartphones. QField forms and button placements are now optimized to be easy to use with your thumbs.

New features

We keep on listening to your feedback and prioritize new features based on it. We did implement some minor features like allowing hiding legend nodes and printing to PDF using the current extent. But this time’s superstars are three highly expected features: Splitting of geometries, compass integration and, yes you guessed right, native camera and gallery app support!

Split Features

A new editing tool is available that allows for splitting existing features. This adds an even more powerful operation to an already impressive geometry editing tools set.

Compass integration

A long-awaited feature! QField now shows you on-screen in which direction you are looking, walking, driving, flying or warping direction. This makes it much easier and more pleasant to navigate in the field.

Native Camera and Gallery

It is now possible to use your favourite camera app so that you have more control over how pictures are taken. It is also possible to select pictures which are already on your device by using the new gallery selector.

Pro Tip: You can use any camera app. For example, you can use the open camera app to create geotagged photos if your preinstalled system camera doesn’t save positioning information in EXIF data.

Pro Tip 2: You can use an image annotation app to add notes, sketches, drawings and so on to your images and then choose them from QField via the add from gallery button.

Antenna Height Correction

For high precision measurements, it’s possible to compensate your altitude by a fixed antenna height. This will then automatically adjust all the digitised altitude values.

JPEG 2000

Support for JPEG 2000 raster datasets was added. This lossy format offers a compression rate at par with proprietary formats like ECW or Mr SID.

Pro Tip: save your base maps in JPEG 2000 to save storage.

New Languages

Thanks to the hard work of our community, QField is now also available in Turkish and Japanese.

New packages

You say: wow that’s a lot! We say: there is more
We have upgraded our whole building infrastructure so that you can comfortably get even more QField goodness without having to uninstall your production ready QField.

Automated master builds

After each pull request is merged into our master code, a new package is created and automatically published on the playstore in a dedicated app called QField for QGIS – Unstable (Early Access). Installing this app will allow you to always have the latest build of QField for testing and giving feedback. On your device, this app is completely separated from the production-ready QField and has a distinctive black icon so that you do not confuse it.

Pull request builds

QField is an extremely active project, and as you see we develop multiple functionalities and fixes at the same time. If you’re particularly interested in one of this, our continuous integration fairy builds and publishes new packages automatically at each commit directly to the pull request you are interested in. To see what we are currently working on, have a look at the pull request overview page.

Experimental Windows builds

Last but definitely not least, we’ve set up an Azure CI infrastructure to build QField for windows. For now, we still consider this experimental but we already had some very successful testing. If you are interested in testing out QField for windows you can get it here, remember it is experimental so don’t use it in production yet and give us as much feedback as possible

What’s next?

As you can imagine we’ve had a very busy start of 2020, but even more is to come soon with the next releases of QField. We’d like to thank again all companies and individuals that actively use QField and that invest in making QField even better. If you feel QField misses something you need or would like to support the project, don’t hesitate to get in touch with us.

This summer we went on tour with what turned out to be an extremely popular event: QGIS on the Road

Telling the most remarkable story of Maya the beekeeper building her honey business and fighting against seemingly hopeless challenges with the help of QGIS functionality you probably never heard of.

Attack of the Destructor

In the last episode, Maya started to populate many beehives around her home. She has visualized and labeled them to have concise information and an easily understandable map representation of her honey production.

In case you missed it, watch Episode II: The Rise of the Hives or even better, follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn for all updates.

After Maya realizes that many of her beehives have been infected by severe diseases she needs to act quickly to get an overview of the situation. She grabs some friends and tablets and launches QField to map the situation. After assessing the results with advanced configuration of the attribute table she is ready to choose the right measures and do a precise intervention. And of course, this precise intervention is accompanied with a visualization that is on fire.

And Action!

We have taken care to create subtitles for all the videos so you can comfortably read Maya’s story in your favourite language. To enable the subtitles, just click on the CC button on the player.

Features shown in this episode

• Configuration of attribute form and widgets
• Using QField to collect data in the field (including snapping)
• Configuring the attribute table with colors and icons
• Live layers to show animated maps

Coming Thursday on QGIS on the Road: A New Hope

After emergency response with mobile data collection, attribute table representation optimizations and live layers, Maya will go back to growing her business in the next episode. She will create links between information on different layers by using relations, she will show how to use animated charts on feature forms using the QML widget and she will be using the advanced digitizing tools to create precise geometries based on angles and distances to create an exact map based on a paper sketch.
So better stay tuned 

If you enjoyed this episode, you can find all QGIS on the Road episodes at https://www.opengis.ch/qgis-on-the-road/ or even better, follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn for all updates.

During the 2020 Swiss QGIS Users Group annual meeting, a proposal to improve the plugin manager was accepted to improve QGIS’ plugin manager. Starting with version 3.14, it will be possible to choose whether to install the stable or the experimental version of individual plugins.

This feature will greatly improve the workflow between developers and users of a plugin. Users will be able to easily switch between the stable version used in production, and the experimental version to test out new features.

Until now, it was necessary either to configure a dedicated extensions repository or to have users manually install development version from a zip file.

You can test out this new feature before 3.14 is out by installing a recent nightly build of QGIS and making sure you have enabled the “show experimental versions” in the plugin manager.

We’re very thankful to the Swiss QGIS User Group for funding this new feature!

What are we looking for?

We would like to use WMS offline on QField. For that, we need to figure out what is the best way to get a raster from a WMS and which format is the most efficient (size and performance).

In this post we’ll show you is how to generate the ideal raster file from a WMS and the results of our efficiency tests for the the different raster formats.

WMS to GPKG

The simple way

If there is no limitation on the WMS or you need only a small region, here is the easiest process.

1. Request the WMS and store a description file in XML:

gdal_translate "WMS:url" file.xml -of WMS

2. Create a Geopackage from the information in the description file.

gdal_translate -of GPKG file.xml file.gpkg -co TILE_FORMAT=JPEG

That was quite simple, right?

The larger datasets way

If the command takes too much time, it means that it is trying to download too much data and could be caused by downloading higher resolution data than required.
The command might even completely fail if it contains a request for bigger data blocks thant the server allows.

Here is the process to get larger datasets in a simple way. Let’s use a real example:

1. Use gdal_translate "WMS:https://www.gebco.net/data_and_products/gebco_web_services/web_map_service/mapserv?request=getmap&service=wms&crs=EPSG:4326&format=image/jpeg&layers=gebco_latest&version=1.1.0" test.xml -of WMS
2. Open the test.xml file for editing, here you’ll find the parameters of the WMS. We change the “SizeX” to 3600 and “SizeY” to 1800. By changing these parameters we lower the resolution. It is important to keep proportionality.
3. Another thing we need to change are “BlockSizeX” and “BlockSizeY” that define the size of the tiles. We change both to 2048.
4. Finally, use gdal_translate -of GPKG test.xml test.gpkg -co TILE_FORMAT=JPEG
5. To make a Geopackage pyramid use gdaladdo GPKG:test.gpkg:gebco_latest. It will replace the Geopackage, if you want to keep the original one, you need to copy it first.

Now you have a raster Geopackage that you can use in QField.

Testing raster formats

Preparing the files

As first step we exported our test orthophoto WMS to a plain GeoTIFF using QGIS’ default behaviour.

Rendering test results

We have tested many formats, here is a table with the results of the size and rendering speed in QGIS and QField.
To analyze the speed we used qgis_bench.exe -i 10 -p "C:\test\test.qgs" >> "C:\test\test.log.
Qgis_bench is a tool that renders a QGIS project a number of times to get performance measurements. The parameter -i is to define the iterations and -p is the project used which contains only the generated raster.

Analysis

File size

The Geopackage WEBP (with and without pyramid) has the best result for file size, but it is not yet supported by QField (from 1.6) and is only slightly smaller than the JPEG variant.

Plain GeoTiff, MBTiles, Cloud Optimized GeoTIFF (COG – DEFLATE mode) and Geopackages with PNG generate by far the largest file sizes (up to 20x larger) and are thus not recommended.

Rendering speed

MBTiles are on average double as fast as JPEG Geopackages with pyramids which in turn are more than double as fast as GeoTIFF and 15x faster than COG.
Geopackages without pyramids are 200 to 400 times slower.

Conclusion

Even though MBTiles render faster than the Geopackage pyramid JPEG, they come with an almost 10x bigger storage requirement which makes us say that the best offline raster format supported by QField is Geopackage pyramid JPEG or if you need transparency and slightly smaller files Geopackage pyramid WebP.

If you need transparency before QField 1.6, the best results are achieved with Geopackage pyramid PNG_JPEG.

Serving as a pragmatic community conciliator – collecting thoughts from people with differing opinions and trying to find the high road through difficult issues – I want to focus my and the community’s energies on our core product, QGIS.

Marco Bernasocchi · QGIS.org Chair

OPENGIS.ch has always been dedicated to sustaining QGIS’ technological and economical well-being, supporting it with endless hours of internally funded QA, infrastructure works and developments.

Today we are very proud to announce that our commitment has grown even more as one of our founders and CEO Marco Bernasocchi was elected Chair of the QGIS.org association.

With over 15 years of involvement with QGIS (he started working with QGIS 0.6) and two years serving as vice-chair, Marco will serve for the next two years as Chairperson of the QGIS.org association.

Understanding the importance of the role trusted him, Marco would like to thank the QGIS community for the trust and appreciation. Marco is looking forward to intensifying work with the PSC and the fantastic QGIS community to push QGIS even further.

We wish Marco and the rest of the elected PSC two very successful years full of QGIS awesomeness.

Rock on QGIS! – read more at QGIS Annual General Meeting – 2020

Marco’s vision for QGIS.org:

I want to help QGIS and it’s community thrive under the value proposition of:

Making the most amazing opensource GIS that provides users with value and that meets their needs by providing great functionality and usability, being cost-effective whilst being actively supported by a vibrant and knowledgeable community.

Sharing our work under an open-source license is part of the approach by which we achieve that value proposition as it allows broad collaboration with our developers and users community.

I see FOSS as a very socially responsible way to develop software, but even more, I see the immense technological advantage that writing open-source code brings. This is why I want our focus to be on allowing both pragmatic and ideological views to respectfully coexist and enrich each other.

One of my main motivations to be part of the PSC and to make myself available as project Chair is to help QGIS keep this incredible growth rate by being even more attractive to new community members, sponsors and large/corporate users. To achieve this, the key is maintaining the right balance between sustainable processes (that guarantee the great quality QGIS has been known for) and an interesting and motivating grassroots project to ensure that QGIS remains an attractive project for volunteers to contribute to and help QGIS and its community to grow to become even more the reference [Open Source] GIS project.

This summer we went on tour with what turned out to be an extremely popular event: QGIS on the Road

Telling the most remarkable story of Maya the beekeeper building her honey business and fighting against seemingly hopeless challenges with the help of QGIS functionality you probably never heard of.

The Rise of the Hives

During last episode, Maya demonstrated the basics of the creation of a project: loading WMS layers from the Swiss Geoportal, creating simple layers, automatic setup of widgets, importing and merging layers and even playing with Interlis data.

In case you missed it, watch Episode 1: The GIS Awakens or even better, follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn for all updates.

After analysing the area, Maya now has more hives in the forest. She will locate them using a GPS and import the data through a GPX file. She will then use her advanced knowledge of QGIS symbology capabilities to produce beautiful and meaningful maps.

And Action!

We have taken care to create subtitles for all the videos so you can comfortably read Maya’s story in your favorite language. To enable the subtitles, just click on the CC button on the player.

Features shown in this episode

• Creating a processing model to import data from a GPX file
• Improving labeling
• Using a geometry generator in the symbology
• Importing styles
• Using cluster symbols

Coming Tuesday on QGIS on the Road: Attack of the Destructor

After showing how to process data and load styles, Maya prepares for the next episode. She will have some severe problems and to be able to come up with an emergency plan blindfolded. She will need to collect data on the field using QField and analyze this data in the attribute table before moving on to creating stunning effects by animating the map canvas.
So better stay tuned

If you enjoyed this episode, you can find all QGIS on the Road episodes at https://www.opengis.ch/qgis-on-the-road/ or even better, follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn for all updates.

This summer we went on tour with what turned out to be an extremely popular event: QGIS on the Road

Telling the most remarkable story of Maya the beekeeper building her honey business and fighting against seemingly hopeless challenges with the help of QGIS functionality you probably never heard of.

A new hope

In the last episode, Maya minimized the damage the destructor made to her bees, using complex forms and widgets, the advanced functionalities of the attribute table, live layers and even QField for mobile data collection.

In case you missed it, watch Episode III: Attack of the Destructor or even better, follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn for all updates.

Maya is coming back with a lot of new ideas, demanding more QGIS power. Since she has received plenty of great feedback on honey from hives located at certain spots, she wants to have full overview over the whole area now. First, she uses relations to link information on different layers, then she creates animated charts on feature forms with the QML widget and – to cover the entire area – she uses the advanced digitizing tool to create precise geometries using angles and distances based on a paper sketch.

And Action!

We have taken care to create subtitles for all the videos so you can comfortably read Maya’s story in your favourite language. To enable the subtitles, just click on the CC button on the player.

Features shown in this episode

• Setting up relations and use them in the forms
• Visualize the data using animated charts created in QML
• Create precise geometries with the advanced digitizing tool

Coming Tuesday on QGIS on the Road: The Web Strikes Back

Once Maya has full control over her neighbourhood, she will expand up into the mountains in the next episode. She will show us how she uses spatial bookmarks and live layers to manage her hives without leaving home. Maya also starts a new business: With the help of the QGIS’ print composer and the Lizmap Web Client, she gets her infrastructure ready for tourism.
So stay tuned 

If you enjoyed this episode, you can find all QGIS on the Road episodes at https://www.opengis.ch/qgis-on-the-road/ or even better, follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn for all updates.

This summer we went on tour with what turned out to be an extremely popular event: QGIS on the Road

Telling the most remarkable story of Maya the beekeeper building her honey business and fighting against seemingly hopeless challenges with the help of QGIS functionality you probably never heard of.

The Last Bee

After expanding into the mountains and showing us how she uses spatial bookmarks and live layers to manage her hives without leaving home, Maya also started a new business: with the help of the QGIS’ print layout manager, QGIS server and the Lizmap Web Client, Maya got her infrastructure ready for tourism.

In case you missed it, watch Episode V: The Web Strikes Back or even better, follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn for all updates.

Terrible news, a killer bee swarm escaped from a laboratory in northern Italy. Maya is desperate, if the killer bee reach her hives, it’s all gone. Maybe the weather could help Maya so she modelling the speed of travel of the killer bees and animates her analysis to see if her bees are likely to survive…

And Action!

We have taken care to create subtitles for all the videos so you can comfortably read Maya’s story in your favourite language. To enable the subtitles, just click on the CC button on the player.

Features shown in this episode

• Raster analysis using processing models
• Animating rasters using the Timemanager plugin

Wrapping up

If you enjoyed this episode, you can find all QGIS on the Road episodes at https://www.opengis.ch/qgis-on-the-road/ or even better, follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn for all updates.

We hope you enjoyed enjoyed our QGIS on the Road series and that you could learn some new tricks. Obviously this is only a fraction of the possibilities offered by the QGIS/QField Ecosystem which we know inside-out.

At OPENGIS.ch we can help you set up your spatial data infrastructure based on seamlessly integrated desktop, web and mobile components. We support your team in planning, developing, deploying and running your infrastructure. Thanks to several senior geodata infrastructure experts, QGIS core developers and the makers of QField, OPENGIS.ch has all it takes to make your project a success. OPENGIS.ch is known for its commitment to high-quality products and its continuous efforts to improve the open source ecosystem.

This summer we went on tour with what turned out to be an extremely popular event: QGIS on the Road

Telling the most remarkable story of Maya the beekeeper building her honey business and fighting against seemingly hopeless challenges with the help of QGIS functionality you probably never heard of.

The Web Strikes Back

In the last episode, Maya has got full control over her neighbourhood and she has now a complete overview of her bees habits.

In case you missed it, watch Episode IV: A New Hope or even better, follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn for all updates.

Maya expands up into the mountains. She will show us how she uses spatial bookmarks and live layers to manage her hives without leaving home. Maya also starts a new business: with the help of the QGIS’ print layout manager, QGIS server and the Lizmap Web Client, she gets her infrastructure ready for tourism.

And Action!

We have taken care to create subtitles for all the videos so you can comfortably read Maya’s story in your favourite language. To enable the subtitles, just click on the CC button on the player.

Features shown in this episode

• Creation and use of spatial bookmarks
• Use of live layers
• Print layouts
• Publish a project online with Lizmap Web Client

Coming Thursday on QGIS on the Road: The Last Bee

After reaching the peak of success, in the next episode, Maya will use raster analysis and the time manager plugin to try to avert a serious threat looming over her bees. Will she succeed? Stay tuned to find out

If you enjoyed this episode, you can find all QGIS on the Road episodes at https://www.opengis.ch/qgis-on-the-road/ or even better, follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn for all updates.