It was unfortunate that we were unable to attend the 2011 6th QGIS Developer Meeting in Zurich, Switzerland, personally. But thanks to technology, we joined in “virtually,” which enabled us to discuss the various problems on IRC, mailing lists, and coding.
Based on information obtained, NextGIS was able to make 11 significant commits оn the NextGIS account (not counting backports commits), including both new features and bugfixes. Most of these fixes will go into bugfix release 1.7.2, while new functionality will be available to users from version 1.8.0.
So, here’s what was done:
- We added a new “Densify geometries” tool. This tool allows one to increase the number of nodes in line or polygon geometries.
- We added a new”Create spatial index” tool for batch-building of spatial indexes for layers and files on disks.
- Process handling for tools from the “Vector” menu were optimized. Now the tools “Simplify geometry,” “Merge shapefiles to one,” “Densify geometries,” and “Create spatial index” do not block the main QGIS window, allowing long-time operations in background mode to run and continue working with other data.
- We made GUI improvements: the tool “What’s this?” is now also accessible from the Help menu; optimized labels in “Options” dialog; and unused widgets in the “Geoprocessing” tools were removed.
- We fixed a nasty bug in the “Union” tool, which caused holes in output
- The “Assign projection” tool was fixed
- We added a GUI for the gdal_fillnodata.py utility (GDALTools)
More information can be found in the Linfiniti Geo Blog.