Cartographica 1.5 available | Cartographica Blog

Today we released Cartographica 1.5 to everyone. We appreciate your patience over the last year, and 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:

Formal release notes are on the macgis.com Release Notes, but here are the highlights:

Support for Dark Mode
New georeference model
Raster height analysis tools
Improved image caching performance
Added support for all OS-known photo formats (including HEIF, HEIC, Cannon, Sony, etc) for photo GPS encoding
Substantial internal modernization
Online documentation now available on the Cartographica Documentation site (still available as PDF from the support page)

Requirement of active maintenance for services and support

Speaking of support (and our appreciation for yours), now comes the uncomfortable time for us to ask for a little bit more of your support to keep development and support of Cartographica moving.

You may be aware that Cartographica has always had a maintenance program, to provide for ongoing development and support. In addition, members with support have been eligible to receive the services that we provide from Bing (Live Maps and Bing Geocoding). Many of you have participated in the program in the past by purchasing support. Over the last couple of years, we became aware that support notifications were not reliably being sent, and since the software wasn't policing support either, that meant that many of you never knew your support had expired. Starting with version 1.5, we now have reminders built in to let you know when your support has expired and we will be updating our mechanisms for messaging that ahead of time.

Support for services provided by ClueTrust (such as the currently-provided Bing Maps and Bing Geocoding) and access to support and versions beyond 1.5.x of Cartographica will require active paid maintenance.

Technically, this has always been the case, but we haven't had the servers set to enforce the limitation prior to some recent changes.

Renewal and grace period

Renewal of support can be done through the macgis.com Renewal page. Once there, you can enter your original key and you should be taken directly to the 2Checkout store for Cartographica. For a limited time, we've put all expired support into a grace period for the next 30 days, allowing the continued use of the online services and renewal of long-expired maintenance.

OS compatibility

Cartographica 1.5 supports macOS X High Sierra and later (10.13.6+). Going forward, we'll likely move to adopt new Apple technologies sooner and that's likely to not only result in quicker release cycles, but will mean moving the minimum requirements more quickly than we have in the past.

With last week's announcement of Apple Silicon being the direction for the CPUs of the future of the Macintosh, there's going to be quite a bit of work this year making sure that we can support the Macs of the future, as well as the existing Intel-based Macs. We will be working hard to support both platforms under macOS 11 by the time of the first Apple Silicon release.

For those who are interested, our Continuous Integration system (used for automated build and test) consists of a number of Intel Mac minis, and that'll continue to be the case for the foreseeable future so that even as the Apple Silicon transition progresses, we'll still have consistent testing across both hardware platforms. If you were here in the early days of Cartographica, you'll know that we started Cartographica back in the Intel+PowerPC days, and supported the PowerPC until the final supported OS (10.5.x) that supported both platforms.