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:

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

Support for native Apple Silicon
Major updates to the GDAL and PROJ libraries that we use for file import/export and CRS management
Support for Command Line Tools

File format changes

As indicated in our announcement of 1.6, there are some adjustments to the file formats supported by Cartographica (the current listing of which is in the software and on our site).

As time evolves, there will be formats added and removed based on library requirements, maintenance issues, licensing, or other reasons. If you have a file that is using a format supported by a previous version of Cartographica, but not by the current version, we recommend that you look to see if the data is available in a supported format, or that you translate the format by using Cartographica's internal tools (or the newly-available command-line tools).

Additions

New drivers available in this release:

Zarr Raster
STACIT Raster
STACTA Raster

Removals

In addition to the list in Preparing for 1.6, the following formats are no longer available in 1.6:

RDA
MG4 LIDAR
FujiBAS Scanner Images
Image Display and Analysis (WinDisp)
Geomedia
GPS TrackMaker
EPIInfo Format
Walk
GMT raster
OGR GRASS

Platform differences

The MrSID drivers that we use for the Intel code are not available from Extensis, the current owner of the libraries and patents. We recommend moving away from the MrSID proprietary format and towards other standard formats such as JPEG2000, GeoTIFF, or something otherwise appropriate for your needs.

We realize that the OpenJPEG drivers we're using aren't super efficient for the Intel processors, so for the time being, we are still using the MrSID drivers for reading JPEG 2000 on Intel machines. That's likely to change as I'd like to get the drivers unified across all of the platforms.

Requirement of active maintenance for services and support

As detailed in Preparing for 1.6 last year, there are a few changes to Cartographica 1.6, including the requirement that you have up-to-date maintenance in order to run 1.6. If you have a perpetual license to any previous version of Cartographica, you will still be able to run the latest versions of 1.5, although they will not be officially supported.

Support for services provided by ClueTrust (such as the currently-provided MapBox maps and 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

It's also important to note that although we are supporting 10.15 in release 1.6, the expectation in the future is that we will move to supporting the current OS and the immediate-prior release. Today we are supporting 2 prior releases (current is macOS 12, previous macOS 11, and prior to that macOS 10.15). This fall, we expect to drop at least macOS 10.15, and will evaluate the benefits and disadvantages of macOS 11 support after macOS 13 comes out.

Cartographica Blog