[Portugal] Announcing the release of QGIS 1.6.0 'Copiapó'

[Giovanni Manghi]

We are very pleased to announce the release of QGIS 1.6.0, the next in
our development release series.

Binary and source code packages are available at:

http://download.qgis.org

The release announcement and changelog is available here:

http://blog.qgis.org/node/146

Along with the release of QGIS 1.6.0, the QGIS Community Team is hard
at work on an updated QGIS Users' Guide version 1.6. The guide will be
available in the near future - we will post announcements when it is
available.

QGIS is a completely 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.

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.

Happy QGIS'ing!

Regards

-- 
Tim Sutton - QGIS Project Steering Committee Member (Release  Manager)
==============================================
Visit http://linfiniti.com to find out about:
 * QGIS programming services
 * Mapserver and PostGIS based hosting plans
 * FOSS Consulting Services
Skype: timlinux Irc: timlinux on #qgis at freenode.net
==============================================




Whats new in Version 1.6.0 'Capiapó'?

Please note that this is a release in our 'cutting edge' release series.
As such it contains new features and extends the programmatic interface
over QGIS 1.0.x and QGIS 1.5.0. We recommend that you use this version
over previous releases.

This release includes over 177 bug fixes and many new features and
enhancements. Once again it is impossible to document everything here
that has changed so we will just provide a bullet list of key new
features here.


General Improvements
      * Added gpsd support to live gps tracking.
      * A new plugin has been included that allows for offline editing.
      * Field calculator will now insert NULL feature value in case of
        calculation error instead of stopping and reverting calculation
        for all features.
      * Allow user specific PROJ.4 search paths and update srs.db to
        include grid reference.
      * Added a native (C++) raster calculator implementation which can
        deal with large rasters efficiently.
      * Improved interaction with extents widget in statusbar so that
        the text contents of the widget can be copied and pasted.
      * Many improvements and new operators to the vector attribute
        table field calculator including field concatenation, row
        counter etc.
      * Added --configpath option that overrides the default path
        (~/.qgis) for user configuration and forces QSettings to use
        this directory, too. This allows users to e.g. carry QGIS
        installation on a flash drive together with all plugins and
        settings.
      * Experimental WFS-T support. Additionally ported wfs to network
        manager.
      * Georeferencer has had many tidy ups and improvements.
      * Support for long int in attribute dialog and editor.
      * The QGIS Mapserver project has been incorporated into the main
        SVN repository and packages are being made available. QGIS
        Mapserver allows you to serve your QGIS project files via the
        OGC WMS protocol. Read More
      * Select and measure toolbar flyouts and submenus.
      * Support has been added for non-spatial tables (currently OGR,
        delimited text and PostgreSQL providers). These tables can be
        used for field lookups or just generally browsed and edited
        using the table view.
      * Added search string support for feature ids ($id) and various
        other search related improvements.
      * Added reload method to map layers and provider interface. Like
        this, caching providers (currently WMS and WFS) can synchronize
        with changes in the datasource.
Table of contents (TOC) improvements
      * Added a new option to the raster legend menu that will stretch
        the current layer using the min and max pixel values of the
        current extent.
      * When writing shape files using the table of contents context
        menu's 'Save as' option, you can now specify OGR creation
        options.
      * In the table of contents, it is now possible to select and
        remove several layers at once.
Labelling (New generation only)
      * Data defined label position in labeling-ng.
      * Line wrapping, data defined font and buffer settings for
        labeling-ng.
Layer properties and symbology
      * Three new classification modes added to graduated symbol
        renderer (version 2), including Natural Breaks (Jenks), Standard
        Deviations, and Pretty Breaks (based on pretty from the R
        statistical environment). Read More
      * Improved loading speed of the symbol properties dialog.
      * Data-defined rotation and size for categorized and graduated
        renderer (symbology-ng).
      * Use size scale also for line symbols to modify line width.
      * Replaced raster histogram implementation with one based on Qwt.
        Added option to save histogram as image file. Show actual pixel
        values on x axis of raster histogram.
      * Added ability to interactively select pixels from the canvas to
        populate the transparency table in the raster layer properties
        dialog.
      * Allow creation of color ramps in vector color ramp combo box.
      * Added "style manager..." button to symbol selector so that users
        will find the style manager more easily.
Map Composer
      * Added capability to show and manipulate composer item width/
        height in item position dialog.
      * Composer items can now be deleted with the backspace key.
      * Sorting for composer attribute table (several columns and
        ascending / descending).