Well, general writing on the site has slowed to a crawl as we've been working hard to enhance Cartographica, our Macintosh GIS, for those people participating in the preview release. Today we announce the availability of Preview Release 2, the second release to the public of Cartographica. There's more detail on what we've changed and what we're working on by following the link.

We've been pretty busy for the last few weeks stomping out bugs and adding features in some important areas with some concentration on data generation. Details of many of these changes are in the release notes and in our RSS feed.

To ease the creation of maps and geospatial data, we've added a way to graphically input geometries for features by using the mouse to select, edit, add, and delete points. New features can now be added to layers as well through a simple menu item. For more precise requirements, the existing mechanism of directly modifying the point values in geometries for features has been enhanced to allow insertion and deletion of points.

For enhanced map creation, we've added control over fonts, sizes, and many style attributes (such as text color, shadow, underlines) to our existing palette of style capabilities. These changes can be made from the Legend window or the existing Style Set window when editing a style. For each style in a set, you can configure separate text attributes and fonts.

We've also added to our export and import capabilities, including KML export of maps, MapInfo export of maps (although we haven't thoroughly tested this) and ECW raster formats for import. In the upcoming releases, we will be expanding the number of import and export formats and converting more of the import/export routines to internal routines for performance and feature reasons. Right now, many of the importers and a few of the exporters are using GDAL for these purposes. Although the GDAL library is well thought-out and well maintained, there are a lot of things we can do on the Mac that won't make things better on other platforms. In this case, we will implement those ourselves over time.

There's a lot more, and we're waiting to hear from each of you with your thoughts on where we should go from here. If you haven't already gotten your copy, please visit MacGIS to sign up and download your copy today.