For those in the DC region looking at maps of DC, there has been (since Google Maps came out) a large blurry hole between Wisconsin and Massachusetts Avenues NW. It was circular and pretty darned large. In fact, for the short period in time when the White House was somewhat blurred out, the Naval Observatory was a much larger "missing piece." The White House was made visible years ago, but the Naval Observatory had been blurred until just recently. Looking at some maps for the area yesterday, I noticed that you can now see the home of the Vice President …

Just in case we were wondering how much mapping is making it into the mainstream, check out the new features in Apple's iLife '09 products. For starters, they've added support for manual geocoding (type a place name and drag a pin around on a map) and maps for navigation of photo data. This is all encapsulated in a new feature they refer to as "places". And, the support has been extended from the photo management side to photo book production, providing nearly effortless map addition to a photo book. Pretty neat. On the video side, Apple's iMovie has map templates …

ESRI has announced the 1Q09 availability of ArcPad 8, their mobile system for GIS tasks running under Windows Mobile. Highlights include: new included streetmaps, synchronization with ArcGIS Server, and a new UI.

Google has quietly announced that Google Earth Plus is no longer available. Previously, this version of Google Earth contained the ability to speak with GPS devices (although it was never very flexible about talking to a wide variety of them). According to the blog entry, they'll be offering that feature in the free version of the software "in the near future." In the mean time, Google Earth Plus customers can get an extended (2 month instead of 7 days) evaluation license for Google Earth Pro, which has the ability to import GIS data.

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 …

ClueTrust is very pleased to announce today, GIS Day 2008, that we have released as a Preview Release, Cartographica, a brand new GIS package for the Macintosh. Please head over to our dedicated MacGIS site for more details and to download a copy. Ever since my brother, Derek, started working in GIS, he's been complaining about the lack of good GIS software for the Macintosh. In fact, he did a popular Mac GIS Software review of the topic on this site a couple of years ago. In the intervening time, not a lot has happened for the Macintosh GIS community …

Ogle Earth has a very interesting article about the ban on GPS devices in Egypt. Egypt, Syria, and North Korea are said to be the only countries in the world that still have consumer GPS bans. The key impact appears to be on local GIS organizations that need to use other means to gather data.

If you are interested in GIS for the Macintosh, we have some exciting news for you. ClueTrust, makers of LoadMyTracks, and owners of this site, are preparing for the first preview release of their GIS software for the Macintosh. In preparation, we've put together a survey that we'd like you to take in order to help us hone the message and features. If you get all the way through it and leave your name and email, we'll provide you with an online coupon for a discount on the final release (expected some time in the spring). Thanks in advance!

Google, this morning, announced that Google Earth is available for the iPhone via the iTunes AppStore. There doesn't appear to be any way to use your own layers, but maybe that's a feature that we'll have to do a bit more searching for or will come in a future release...hopefully. Having downloaded and tried out the application, I can say it certainly is a slick piece of work. The options dialog seems to be a bit quirky (I can't tell whether it's crashing or just running afoul of the iPhone guard timer), but the zooming, panning and search functions …

OneGeology is a new web site with the mission to "Make web-accessible the best available geological map data worldwide at a scale of about 1: 1 million, as a geological survey contribution to the International Year of Planet Earth." It's an exciting endeavor and one that might mean more data and easier to find data on the Internet. The effort is to accumulate a comprehensive list of available WMS servers and make those servers available through their portal. They are currently (as of today) claiming 94 participating countries, including many that are already making data available. They are also working …

GIS Day 2008 is coming, November 19! Mark it on your calendar and make sure you come back here for a special announcement from ClueTrust. The GIS Day web site allows you to search for events near you, and provides historical context for the celebration, which is always held on the Wednesday in the middle of Geography Awareness Week (sponsored by the National Geographic Society). A sample of some of the things going on this year include: National Geographic's continuing Geography Action! ESRI always has something going on at their site. and the USGS is usually doing something at each …

GeoEye has posted the initial picture taken from the new GeoEye-1 satellite. This is the high-resolution satellite co-sponsored by Google and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency. Thanks to Gizmodo and Wired for noting this.

A good thought piece from Ed Parsons' blog today about the half-life of geodata. Using the announcement (thanks to All Points Blog) this weekend that 35-years of Landsat data would be available to the public on the web as an impetus for discussion, Ed muses about the useful life of data.

There are a lot of things about algorithmic patents that just seem wrong, and I'm not going to sit here and debate the obviousness of the work in patent application 10/631611 by Bryan Kendall Beatty via Microsoft, however I think there is an interesting lesson in how innovation helps us defeat patent lockout. I'm making a series of assumptions here on how the patent rulings are actually going to come down, but we'll see how this goes. There are really 3 algorithms and two patents at play in this story (assuming for the moment that none of the patents …

Thanks to Gizmodo, Reuters, and Derek (no link), we're now aware that TomTom has a working version of their navigator for the iPhone. It's going to be an interesting couple of months.

Just in time for Memorial Day, Google announced (using the LatLong blog) a new Google Earth Browser Plug-in, which "[brings] the full power of Google Earth to the web." Unfortunately, it works under Windows only, so those of us on Macs will presumedly have to wait a while.

For those of you who use our LoadMyTracks program along with the Sony CS-1 (or similar) device, you'll have noticed that for a large portion of the last year, it has been nearly useless. From 10.4.9 on the device hasn't worked correctly on some machines, and as of 10.5 it didn't work with any. Well, the waiting is finally over as Apple's new 10.5.3 works great with LoadMyTracks and the Sony CS-1.

This is more art than science, but there's an article from CNET that describes an attempt to create the largest "drawing" in the world by using a GPS device in an package shipped around the world. Followed by today's article that it was a hoax.

My brother Derek pointed me at this article from CNet about a move by ESRI to more directly and easily support export from ESRI formats to "the geoweb." Now, considering that this is mostly KML, I'm not particularly surprised, since KML is basically a presentation and not analysis format. Would that they were adding more support for WFS!

It's been a while since we talked about LoadMyTracks, software from ClueTrust (our sponsor) and there've been a lot of changes in the past few months. Since March, we've been doing a lot of development, and adding support for a lot of new devices, including the latest from Garmin, and some old standbys from Magellan (serial-based receivers now), as well as a new crop from GlobalSat, including the GH-615 Sport Watch and the DG-100 Data Logger (which US GlobalSat was kind enough to send us for development purposes). Click the link for more... We've also improved the scripting capabilities of …