Some of you may already know that ClueTrust (the folks who run this site) has been located in the National Capital Area since 1989 (over 20 years now), and during that time, DC has gone through a lot of changes. The District's new mayor is nothing if not high tech, and to that end announced an amazing level of data openness through the CityDW (City Data Warehouse) program this over the last couple of years. Not surprisingly, this includes a lot of geospatial data. And this continued with a large release of data about the transit system in the last month.

ClueTrust is very, very pleased to announce general availability of Cartographica, the Macintosh GIS.

For those in the DC region looking at maps of DC, there has been (since Google Maps came out) a large blurry hole between Wisconsin and Massachusetts Avenues NW. It was circular and pretty darned large. In fact, for the short period in time when the White House was somewhat blurred out, the Naval Observatory was a much larger "missing piece." The White House was made visible years ago, but the Naval Observatory had been blurred until just recently. Looking at some maps for the area yesterday, I noticed that you can now see the home of the Vice President.

We're happy to announce that we believe we've fixed the rogue user problem and have been able to re-enable the forums and user logins for thi site. With this change, we are also turning on the forums for Cartographica MacGIS. These can be accessed through the Forum link at the top of the page. Enjoy!

Just in case we were wondering how much mapping is making it into the mainstream, check out the new features in Apple's iLife '09 products.

For starters, they've added support for manual geocoding (type a place name and drag a pin around on a map) and maps for navigation of photo data. This is all encapsulated in a new feature they refer to as "places". And, the support has been extended from the photo management side to photo book production, providing nearly effortless map addition to a photo book. Pretty neat.

On the video side, Apple's iMovie has map templates that will create an animated fly-to effect from the departure point to the arrival point. It looks like there might be some other related features in there, but we won't really know that until it's available later this month.

Nothing earth-shattering in terms of capability, but in terms of ease-of-use and accessibility it's a pretty amazing step.

ESRI has announced the 1Q09 availability of ArcPad 8, their mobile system for GIS tasks running under Windows Mobile. Highlights include: new included streetmaps, synchronization with ArcGIS Server, and a new UI.

Google has quietly announced that Google Earth Plus is no longer available. Previously, this version of Google Earth contained the ability to speak with GPS devices (although it was never very flexible about talking to a wide variety of them). According to the blog entry, they'll be offering that feature in the free version of the software "in the near future." In the mean time, Google Earth Plus customers can get an extended (2 month instead of 7 days) evaluation license for Google Earth Pro, which has the ability to import GIS data.

Well, general writing on the site has slowed to a crawl as we've been working hard to enhance Cartographica, our Macintosh GIS, for those people participating in the preview release. Today we announce the availability of Preview Release 2, the second release to the public of Cartographica. There's more detail on what we've changed and what we're working on by following the link.

ClueTrust is very pleased to announce today, GIS Day 2008, that we have released as a Preview Release, Cartographica, a brand new GIS package for the Macintosh. Please head over to our dedicated MacGIS site for more details and to download a copy.

Ogle Earth has a very interesting article about the ban on GPS devices in Egypt. Egypt, Syria, and North Korea are said to be the only countries in the world that still have consumer GPS bans. The key impact appears to be on local GIS organizations that need to use other means to gather data.