[OSGeo Africa] Announcing the release of QGIS 1.8

[Tim Sutton]

We are very pleased to announce the release of QGIS 1.8.0 'Lisboa'.
This release contains new features and extends the programmatic
interface over QGIS 1.0.x and QGIS 1.7.x

Binary and source code packages are available at:

http://download.qgis.org

If there is not yet a package for your platform on the above page,
please check back regularly as packagers are still pushing out their
work and they will update the download page to reflect the new
packages. Along with the release of QGIS 1.8.0, the QGIS Community
Team is hard at work on an updated QGIS Users' Guide version 1.8.0.
The guide will be available in the near future - we will post
announcements when it is available.

A word of thanks to our contributors, donors and sponsors
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

QGIS is a largely volunteer driven project, and is the work of a
dedicated team of developers, documenters and supporters. We extend
our thanks and gratitude for the many, many hours people have
contributed to make this release happen. Many companies and
organisations contribute back improvements to QGIS when they use it as
their platform, and we are grateful for this and encourage others to
do the same! We would also like to thank our sponsors and donors for
helping to promote our work through their financial contributions. Our
current* sponsors are:

Silver Sponsor

- State of Vorarlberg (http://www.vorarlberg.at - Austria, November 2011)

Bronze Sponsors
- Argusoft (http://www.argusoft.de - Germany, June 2012)
- GeoSynergy (http://www.geosynergy.com.au - Australia May, 2012)
- ibW Bildungszentrum Wald (http://www.bzwmaienfeld.ch - Switzerland,
March 2012)
- City of Uster (http://gis.uster.ch - Switzerland - November 2011)

*QGIS Sponsorship is valid for one year.

A current list of donors who have made contributions large and small
to the project can be seen here:

http://qgis.org/en/sponsorship/donors.html

If you would like to make a donation or sponsor our project, please
visit http://www.qgis.org/en/sponsorship.html . QGIS is Free software
and you are under no obligation to do so.


Visual tour of the new release:
--------------------------------------------

You can find a list of highlighted changes and new features listed on
the detailed release announcement available here:

http://qgis.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=149

New features with this release:
---------------------------------------------
- QGIS Browser - a stand alone app and a new panel in QGIS. The
browser lets you easily navigate your file system and connection based
(PostGIS, WFS etc.) datasets, preview them and drag and drop items
into the canvas.
- DB Manager - the DB manager is now officially part of QGIS core. You
can drag layers from the QGIS Browser into DB Manager and it will
import your layer into your spatial database. Drag and drop tables
between spatial databases and they will get imported. You can use the
DB Manager to execute SQL queries against your spatial database and
then view the spatial output for queries by adding the results to QGIS
as a query layer.
- Action Tool - now there is a tool on the map tools toolbar that will
allow you to click on a vector feature and execute an action.
- MSSQL Spatial Support - you can now connect to your Microsoft SQL
Server spatial databases using QGIS.
- Customization - allows setting up simplified QGIS interface by
hiding various components of main window and widgets in dialogs.
- New symbol layer types - Line Pattern Fill, Point Pattern fill
- Composers - have multiple lines on legend items using a specified character
- Expression based labelling
- Heatmap tool - a new core plugin has been added for generating
raster heatmaps from point data. You may need to activate this plugin
using the plugin manager.
- GPS Tracking - The GPS live tracking user interface was overhauled
and many fixes and improvements were added to it.
- Menu Re-organisation - The menus were re-organised a little - we now
have separate menus for Vector and Raster and many plugins were
updated to place their menus in the new Vector and Raster top level
menus.
- Offset Curves - a new digitising tool for creating offset curves was added.
- Terrain Analysis Plugin - a new core plugin was added for doing
terrain analysis - and it can make really good looking coloured relief
maps.
- Ellipse renderer - symbollayer to render ellipse shapes (and also
rectangles, triangles, crosses by specifying width and height).
Moreover, the symbol layer allows to set all parameters (width,
height, colors, rotation, outline with) from data fields, in mm or map
units
- New scale selector with predefined scales
- Option to add layers to selected or active group
- Pan To Selected tool
- New tools in Vector menu - densify geoemtries, Build spatial index
- Export/add geometry column tool can export info using layer CRS,
project CRS or ellipsoidal measurements
- Model/view based tree for rules in rule-based renderer
- Updated CRS selector dialog
- Improvements in Spatial Bookmarks
- Plugin metadata in metadata.txt
- New plugin repository
- Refactored postgres data provider: support for arbitrary key
(including non-numeric and multi column), support for requesting a
certain geometry type and/or srid in QgsDataSourceURI
added gdal_fillnodata to GDALTools plugin
- Support for PostGIS TopoGeometry datatype
- Python bindings for vector field symbollayer and general updates to
the python bindings.
- New message log window
- Benchmark program
- Row cache for attribute table
- Legend independent drawing order
- UUID generation widget for attribute table
- Added support of editable views in SpatiaLite databases
- Expression based widget in field calculator
- Creation of event layers in analysis lib using linear referencing
- Group selected layers option added to the TOC context menu
- load/save layer style (new symbology) from/to SLD document
- WFS support in QGIS Server
- Option to skip WKT geometry when copying from attribute table
- upport for zipped and gzipped layers
- Test suite now passes all tests on major platforms and nightly tests
- Copy and paste styles between layers
- Set tile size for WMS layers
- Support for nesting projects within other projects

Happy QGIS'ing!

Regards,

The QGIS Team!


-- 
Tim Sutton - QGIS Project Steering Committee Member (Release  Manager)
==============================================
Please do not email me off-list with technical
support questions. Using the lists will gain
more exposure for your issues and the knowledge
surrounding your issue will be shared with all.

Visit http://linfiniti.com to find out about:
 * QGIS programming and support services
 * Mapserver and PostGIS based hosting plans
 * FOSS Consulting Services
Skype: timlinux
Irc: timlinux on #qgis at freenode.net
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