Gaige B. Paulsen Articles


Cartogaphica End of Support

As previously announced in Sunsetting Cartographica Cartographica has reached end of support. We will keep the documentation and support sites running for a while. Customers with paid, perpetual licenses should have their license codes that will provide access even after our licensing servers go off line. All previous MapBox and Bing related services have been discontinued. If you need the Live Maps feature, or the Geocoding feature, please work directly with Bing or Mapbox to get an active account for these services and you can place the API key into Cartographica for using those services. For those choosing to use …

Cartographica 1.7 available

Today we released Cartographica 1.7. This will be the last major release for Cartographica, and I want to extend my appreciation to all Cartographica users, past and present. As I sunset Cartographica, I will be monitoring macOS 14 during Apple's beta period and if necessary, will release a bug-fix release for compatibility with macOS 14. If you run into problems with 1.7 with any of the supported operating systems (macOS 11.7+), please report bugs. Information about many of the largest changes are available in previous postings here: Formal release notes are on the macgis.com Release Notes …

Sunsetting CartoMobile

Along with the Sunsetting of Cartographica I am announcing the immediate sunset of CartoMobile. Effective immediately, CartoMobile will no longer be available for sale on the AppStore. CartoMobile will still be available for use by users who purchased it previously, and I have no intention of removing it for re-download. Although I realize this will come as a disappointment to those of you who are currently using CartoMobile, I can no longer justify the resources necessary to keep it operational based on revenue. The situation is similar to Cartographica, although perhaps even more about the business model. In the case …

Sunsetting Cartographica

After 18 years of working on Cartographica and CartoMobile, it's time for a change at ClueTrust. Today I'm announcing that I will be sunsetting Cartographica this year, with end of sales being July 31, 2023, and end of support being December 31, 2023. At the end of July, it will no longer be possible to purchase Cartographica support or new products. Any existing customers will be able to continue to use the software based on their existing license. A bit of background Cartographica has been alternatively an avocation or vocation for me since I started working on it in 2005 …

Cartographica 1.6.2 available

Today we released Cartographica 1.6.2, which is a bug fix release. This version builds on Cartographica 1.6, released in June and provides some specific bug fixes. Cartographica 1.6.2 is available to all users with a Cartographica license for 1.6 and later. Formal release notes are on macgis.com Release Notes, but here are the highlights: fix: CPG files (as part of Shapefiles) are now correctly interpreted if they have whitespace before or after the code page or character set. fix: encoding selection in open dialog ignored [#2306] fix: formula window title drifts on resize …

Cartographica 1.6.1 available

Today we released Cartographica 1.6.1. This is a minor bug-fix release of Cartographica 1.6.0 and contains a number of bug fixes, feature enhancements, and performance improvements. Much of the updates have centered around keeping Cartographica up to date with the latest security improvements and bug fixes for underlying technologies that we use. Today we released Cartographica 1.6.1, which is a bug fix and feature enhancement release. This version builds on Cartographica 1.6, released in June and provides some specific bug fixes. Cartographica 1.6.1 is available to all users with a Cartographica …

Cartographica 1.6 available

Today we released Cartographica 1.6. After 6 releases of version 1.5, we are now moving to the next chapter. We appreciate the support of all of you who ran development and beta versions of the software. We have a small team here at ClueTrust and we appreciate the loyalty of our customers and your continued support. Information about many of the largest changes are available in previous postings here: There were a few posts about our support for Apple Silicon: Apple Silicon Cometh Welcome to the future Formal release notes are on the macgis.com Release Notes, but …

Command Line Tools for GDAL and PROJ

As many of you may be aware, we have used GDAL and PROJ for many years to handle file import and export as well as coordinate reference system management in Cartographica. As such, we include a private copy of those libraries in Cartographica. Internally, I've made use of the command line tools for a number of years when necessary, but they've never been a part of what we have made available as part of Cartographica. Starting with 1.6, we are going to make those available to users with a valid Cartographica license. As with all command-line tools, there's quite …

Apple Silicon Beta and more

It took a while longer than expected, but the first beta version of Cartographica 1.6 is now available in the Beta channel. You can get access by choosing Beta next to Automatically check for updates in the Preferences window, or by downloading directly from Cartographica 1.6b1. As fortold in Apple Silicon Cometh, the new version is currently 1.6b1 and includes all of the features of the previous versions of Cartographica and more. There are many changes under the hood (besides the ability to run natively on Apple Silicon and Intel Macs), notably some significant upgrades to the …

Apple Silicon Cometh

As indicated in Welcome to the Future, we've been making use of the new Apple Silicon Macs since they were announced at WWDC 2020. However, during that time, the impact on Cartographica has been limited because of limitations on some of our library providers. While libraries with source code (such as the venerable GDAL, without which most GIS applications would be significantly weaker) were relatively straightforward to move to Apple Silicon, some of the proprietary libraries Cartographica uses to access proprietary file formats have not been as easy. After months (stretching in to over a year since Apple shipped the …

Cartographica Available by Subscription

One feature I discussed last summer in Preparing for 1.6, was the introduction of a true subscription version of Cartographica. Over the years, we've always provided the Student subscription (limited to up to 4 years and some other limits, such as one computer), but we've never offered subscription options for Cartographica to commercial customers. Since the software industry in general is moving in that direction, I'm announcing that as of today, Cartographica will also be available as a subscription. Note: if you have an existing Perpetual subscription, nothing changes for you. Perpetual licenses are just that: a perpetual license …

Cartographica 1.5.5 available

Today we released Cartographica 1.5.5, which is a bug fix and feature enhancement release. This version builds on Cartographica 1.5, and provides some feature enhancements and specific bug fixes. Cartographica 1.5.5 is available to all users with a Cartographica license. Formal release notes are on macgis.com Release Notes, but here are the highlights: Mapbox is now the default Geocoding and Live Maps provider (details in Preparing for 1.6) Added support for creating rasters from Vector point data [CARTOMAC-1896] Added support for MapBox-based Geocoding [CARTOMAC-2049] Added support for MapBox-based Live Maps [CARTOMAC-2046] Added support …

Mapbox Arrives

With today's release of Cartographica 1.5.5, we are taking the final steps to move towards our future with Mapbox as our new online services provider. Bing has served us well for many years, but as mentioned in Preparing for 1.6, we are moving away from Bing as a provider in April of 2022. Here are the key changes: Beginning with this release, the default for new Live Maps and Geocoding will be the MapBox services. We have added preferences (in the Preferences… panel) for you to put in your own API keys for either Mapbox or Bing …

Cartographica 1.5.4 available

Today we released Cartographica 1.5.4, which is a bug fix and feature enhancement release. This version builds on Cartographica 1.5, and provides some feature enhancements and specific bug fixes. Cartographica 1.5.4 is available to all users with a Cartographica license. Formal release notes are on macgis.com Release Notes, but here are the highlights: Cartographica now has default preferences for both area and length measurements. Existing per-document settings are retained, but these settings will be used for each new document [CARTOMAC-1573] Map Layout scales now use the default preferences for length measurements to determine the …

Preparing for 1.6

As we move toward the beginning of the summer of 2021, we're looking at the early stages of the Cartographica 1.6 release. This release will contain a number of significant changes which should help move the product forward and maintain compatibility while also evolving the internals to keep up with best practices in the industry. This will also usher in some changes to both our support and service offerings and supported formats. Service & Support changes Heading into late 2021, we're implementing some changes for Cartographica's licensing and services: Versions from 1.6 are going to require an active maintenance …

Quick Column Scripting

Occasionally, I get requests for new features that are very simple, and might take longer to deploy in the code base than it would take to make them available through AppleScript. In many of these cases, over the years, I've gone ahead and written and distributed AppleScript to meet these needs. A couple of days ago, a user reached out needing st set a specific column in new rows to a particular value. The general case of this requires providing a way to choose the column to be set, the value to be set, and which rows to set it …

Cartographica 1.5.3 available

Today we released Cartographica 1.5.3, which is a bug fix and feature enhancement release. This version builds on Cartographica 1.5, released in June and provides some specific bug fixes. Cartographica 1.5.3 is available to all users with a Cartographica license. Formal release notes are on macgis.com Release Notes, but here are the highlights: Fixed error message truncation on ODBC Drivers [CARTOMAC-1954] Improved raster image printing on 11 (Big Sur) [CARTOMAC-1947] Updated creation control in MapLayout Fixed crash in calculating nearest distance Restored functioning centroid for Z points in calculated columns [CARTOMAC-1950] Fixed crash when …

Welcome to the Future

This week, Apple released 2 big efforts that have been occupying their corporate resources for quite some time: macOS 11 Big Sur, and Macs based on Apple Silicon. Big Sur As with most new software releases, ClueTrust has been running macOS 11 Big Sur in the lab here since long before this release, and we're happy to announce that Cartographica 1.5.2 is fully compatible with the macOS 11 Big Sur release. Big Sur contained some big changes, and as such, unfortunately, versions of Cartographica prior to 1.5.2 are not compatible. As noted in the 1.5 …

Cartographica 1.5.2 available

Today we released Cartographica 1.5.2, which is a bug fix and feature enhancement release. This version builds on Cartographica 1.5, released in June and provides some specific bug fixes. Cartographica 1.5.2 is available to all users with a Cartographica license. Formal release notes are on macgis.com Release Notes, but here are the highlights: Moved PostgreSQL driver internal to the GDAL system to fix a problem in macOS 11/10.16 [CARTOMAC-1918] Fixed bug in KDM that could cause a crash when representative samples were too close to the border [CARTOMAC-1920] Fixed crash when changing …

Cartographica 1.5.1 available

Today we released Cartographica 1.5.1, which is a bug fix and feature enhancement release. This version builds on Cartographica 1.5, released in June and provides some specific bug fixes and some feature enhancements. Cartographica 1.5.1. is available to all users with a Cartographica license. Formal release notes are on macgis.com Release Notes, but here are the highlights: Support for importing data in Irish Grid and British National Grid reference formats Improved status information and cancel capabilities when exporting maps Improved status information and cancel capabilities when acquiring data from databases Fixed a bug involving …