Dinosaur Database has a really interesting interactive map which will show a location on the Earth as it has moved through time.
Type in your address in the upper-left corner and then use the menu at the top of the page to dial back time to show that location as it would have been millions of years ago.
Although the map has few practical uses, the educational value is significant and it's a great illustration of the power of visualization.
Version 1.4.9 of Cartographica is now available for download from our site and is available in the update stream.
Changes are mostly bug fixes, including a critical fix to Activation and Bing Maps access.
Cartographica 1.4.x is now in critical update mode, with new features going in to 1.5 and beyond. The key changes will be for people with older versions of macOS.
After a lengthy development process and with the help of many fine testers, ClueTrust has released 2.0 of CartoMobile. CartoMobile 2.0 is now available on the App Store.
New for 2.0:
As of September 24, 2018, Apple has released macOS High Sierra (version 10.14).
ClueTrust is unaware of any problems with the current shipping version of Cartographica (1.4.8). All functionality tested is working and we have not experienced any issues with internal testing.
In addition, we've created a new beta of LoadMyTracks that addresses some recent issues with some devices and versions of macOS.
Please make sure that you are using the most recent versions of Cartographica (1.4.8) or LoadMyTracks before reporting a bug when running macOS High Sierra.
Version 1.4.8 of Cartographica is now available for download from our site and is available in the update stream.
Changes are mostly bug fixes, including a critical fix to Bing Geocoding with OS X 10.7.x (introduced in last month's update).
As of the July release, Cartographica 1.4.x is now in critical update mode, with new features going in to 1.5 and beyond. The key change will be for people with older versions of macOS.
Cartographica version 1.4.7 shipped on July 1, 2017 providing a few bug fixes and a crucial change to ensure compatibility with updates to the Bing Maps API that we use for Live Maps.
We encourage everyone using macOS 10.7 or more recent to upgrade to Cartographica 1.4.7.
Release Notes for 1.4.7 are available from MacGIS.com.
In June, Apple announced pre-release availaibility of iOS 11 and macOS High Sierra (10.13). ClueTrust is working to verify complete compatibility with these versions prior to their release this fall.
However, as a rule, we caution against the use of pre-release operating systems for crucial work. Although we are unaware of any problems today that hamper the use of either Cartographica or CartoMobile, it is always possible to experience crashing and data loss with operating systems that have not been fully tested.
With that said, if you choose to experiment with iOS 11 or macOS High Seirra and run …
After quite a long time in beta and development, ClueTrust is pleased to announce the release of CartoMobile 1.4.4, our iOS App for field data collection and use.
There are a lot of changes in 1.4.4, probably quite a few more than would otherwise be indicated by the small bump in version numbers. However, we have put out over 30 test versions since the last release in order to make sure this version is ready to go.
The last version, 1.4.3, was remarkably crash-free. We expect this version to be similarly reliable, although not …
If you have version 1.4.6 (the current shipping version since May 2015) or greater, then your Cartographica is not susceptible to this problem. If you are running 1.4.5 or lower, please read this message.
The updater that we use in Cartographica (Sparkle) has been found to have a specific set of vulnerabilities that can cause remote execution.
The specific problems can be exploited via a MITM (Man-in-the-Middle) attack, resulting in arbitrary code execution in the Javascript portion of the display that Cartographica shows during updates.
Unbeknownst to us, we mitigated this problem last spring when we …
Cartographica version 1.4.5 shipped on March 2, 2015 providing mostly bug fixes for the 1.4 series and increasing compatibiility with large-record shapefiles (contrary to the documentation, a number of products, including ESRI's products, are now using a 32,767-byte limit instead of a 4,095-byte limit for records in the DBF files.
Release Notes for 1.4.5 are available from MacGIS.com.
Cartographica has for a long time supported geocoding photos based either on tracks or based on data inside of the photos themselves. For most of that time, we have supported doing this for bothfiles on disk and images that are stored inside of Apple's iPhoto application.
With recent versions of OS X (basically since 10.8.5 or so), Apple has been providing access to photos in both iPhoto and Aperture through the file selection or Open dialog as well by way of the Media item in the sidebar on the left.
Since the introduction of that feature, we have …
ClueTrust has released Cartographica version 1.4.4, which is now available for download from the MacGIS.com site. This update is free to all current Cartographica users, and any user who has valid trial key. (If you have previously tried Cartographica, you will be eligible for a new 10-day evaluation key if you visit our lost key page.
Full release notes for 1.4.4 are available at our site, but here is a summary of the changes:
There's a great article from VerySpatial making the case that the use of "analog" maps in cases where differential information is being compared might night be the best way to display data online. We've been looking into this space recently and already have excellent KML Export in Cartographica, which can be easily paired with online tools like Google Layers and Leaflet.
The original article from The Washington Post is an interesting piece about use of time across the US.
We are pleased to announce the release of Cartographica version 1.4.3, our latest minor feature and bug fix release. As with previous versions of 1.4.x, 1.4.3 is compatible with OS X versions 10.7, 10.8 and 10.9 (and we've also done some preliminary testing on 10.10).
Features that we have included in the 1.4.3 release include:
The USGS has announced that the National Atlas will be taken out of service as of September 30, 2014. According to the detailed product availability information, much of the data will be available via the to-be-enhanced National Map system, or as data downloads "at no cost" from Earth Explorer".
This transition appears to be mostly a resource realignment (basically reducing the number of sources and web sites they need to maintain.
In addition, the USGS has also announced that "[L]ater this year we will deliver these new framework datasets at one million-scale: networked hydrography, updated streams and waterbodies, streamflow …
Scientific American posted an overview about tectonic plate movement, datums and geodesy. The article covers a fair amount of ground in some depth, but not so much so that it's confusing. Check it out and contemplate the amount of work that we'll all be doing when the USGS updates the datum in another few years.
For those who are curious, Cartographica maintains a large list of datum and datum shift information so that it can accurately overlay coordinates from one system onto another. These calculations aren't trivial and we had quite a time squeezing these conversions into the first version …
We have been testing against Mavericks since the early betas and the 1.4.2 version of Cartographica works well with it. At this point, we aren't taking advantage of any Mavericks-specific features, but we have found on our test machines that the upgrade is a good performance move, especially for laptops.
Other ClueTrust software, such as LoadMyTracks, has also been tested and works fine with Mavericks (excepting, of course, the long-standing issue with the Mac AppStore version of LoadMyTracks and serial devices due to Apple's policy change).
Although we haven't tested any of the 1.2.x versions on …
We at ClueTrust integrated support for OpenStreetMap into both Cartographica and CartoMobile some time ago because it provides an avenue for public updating and curation that is unequaled and also provides data licensing that allows liberal reuse.
We are happy to see the wide range of OpenStreetMap in Government outlined on the OpenStreetMap.US blog.
There are lots of opportunities to improve the data set and make your mark on open data, while improving available map data for everyone.
For those with little background with the organization, it didn't start in the US, but in Europe, where most Geospatial data …
Cartographica 1.4.2 is now available, and it's got a little bit of everything to it: new features, performance enhancements, and bug fixes.
This release ended up taking a bit longer than we expected as we have been working hard to fix the bugs reported in 1.4 and 1.4.1. But, we haven't just been working on fixing bugs, we've also been enhancing the capabilities and performance of the existing capabilities of Cartographica, with improvements in everything from WFS compatibility to execution speed and progress information for many of our analysis tools.
I won't take up the …
iLoveMountains.org is an organization that, "is the product of 14 local, state, and regional organizations across Appalachia that are working together to end mountaintop removal coal mining and create a prosperous future for the region." Together this group provides information and research to the public about the problems that mountain top removal mining has cause, and continues to cause in the Appalachians.
According to iLoveMountain.org, "Mountaintop removal is a relatively new type of coal mining that began in Appalachia in the 1970s as an extension of conventional strip mining techniques. Primarily, mountaintop removal is occurring in West Virginia …