Archive For July, 2011
Normally, I’m not a fan of Microsoft’s graphic design work. Their UI design, especially in Windows, is barely passable, compared to the innovative work in Apple’s OS X and the KDE project. It seems reasonable that their mapping UI would be equally horrid, and that, along with the ubiquity of Google Maps, has relegated Bing […]
In some ways, Python is a very user-friendly language. But it can be very finicky about indentation. Instead of relying on white space and parentheses to impart structure, it uses exacting syntax. To an inexperienced programmer, this is not a problem – in fact, it makes writing scripts very easy to learn. Experienced programmers, on […]
The Python programming language, which has become the standard for scripting in ArcGIS 10.x, is quite versatile, and has a very natural language style. One specific difference from earlier languages (like C) is that variables don’t have to be declared or cast. Instead, they can be declared and assigned in the same statement. Variables have […]
British GIS site web-gis.co.uk is currently hosting a poll about GIS data formats. Not too many people have voted yet, but a clear trend is already emerging. The data suggests that PostGIS has been gaining a lot of ground, eclipsing other popular proprietary data formats. Here’s the current breakdown: PostgreSQL/PostGIS – 17 votes, 65.4% Proprietary […]
