[Qgis-user] report from the field: training on qgis 1.6

[maning sambale]

Hi,

I'm back again from another FOSSGeo training on a remote town in the
Philippines.  For a bit of background, we conducted a five-day basic
GIS training to a local government unit who is building its staff
capacity in using GIS for landuse planning and monitoring of LGU
initiated projects.  The town is very remote and internet is
non-existent.

Some observations and requests (?):
1.  Most of the core functionality of QGIS is complete enough for
basic GIS operations.  However, you miss half of QGIS's power if you
don't have the cool user contributed plugins installed.  Since
internet is not available in this town, what I did is to simply copy
my plugins folder into the other computers so that they can use some
of it.  A cool feature would be an offline cache of all core and 3rd
party plugins.  I don't know how this works, but basically a
possibility for a single laptop to connect to the internet and then
update QGIS plugins (including all dependencies).  Back to the town
office, he/she can then copy the offline cache repo to other
computers.  Similar to an offline debian repo.

2.  After the initial install in windows (a mix of XP, Vista and Win7
machines), when opening a vector layer, the default directory it
points to is the installed "Program Files/Quantum ..." directory.  It
would be nice if it defaults to either the "GIS Database" created
directory or at least to the user's "My Documents"

3. They had some difficulty in the deleting vectors during editing.
Within the "Digitizing" toolbox, you can select a vector line and the
node tool to edit/delete the nodes/vertices.  However, to delete a
line, you need to highlight a line using the "Select Feature" (this
tool is in the "Attribute" toolbox group ) and then the "Delete
Selected" (in the "Digitizing" toolbox).  Note that the "Select
Feature" is not within the "Digitizing".  Normally, the users tried to
find the "Select Feature" within the "Digitizing' group icons.

4. The best feature they liked is the possibility to plot and see
field collected photos in the map view.  Using a GPS and digital
camera we geotagged the photo using another external program.  Then
using photo2shape and evis plugin to visualize the photo location and
the photo itself.  What's missing so far is the integration of
geotagging (writing the lat/lon into the exif) as another plugin.

Overall, the participants are very satisfied with QGIS and they are
happy knowing that they can distribute and install the app to as many
computers within the town office (actually, the cost of the 5days
training is not even half of what an single arc license costs). :)


-- 
cheers,
maning
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"Freedom is still the most radical idea of all" -N.Branden
wiki: http://esambale.wikispaces.com/
blog: http://epsg4253.wordpress.com/
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