So I’ve been busy and haven’t had time to talk much about 2.6. I was less brave this go around with loading the beta version – but brave enough to walk into a customer demo and use it….with great success.
To me QGIS 2.6 feels more solid. There are small things happening all through the application. Some enhancements don’t stick out. At first I didn’t notice the 5 new icons at the top of the layer window or panel.
From left to right:
- Add Group. Click this and add a group layer. You can take layers and group them together by dragging and dropping them into the new group – effectively combining related layers under one group (and setting a projection also with this group layer). Let me create a census block group. I could do this in 2.4 – it’s just more apparent. It still takes about two mouse clicks to accomplish.
- The next icon controls visibility. So I can turn off and on all the layers with one click. I can also record presets. Say I want to turn off everything but the Census Block and the geocoded_temp_2274 layer. I go ahead and manually do it and record a preset – and say I want to give it a name like Stores and Census. I save that preset and can quickly just turn on the things I need on…or off.
- The next two icons expand and collapse your layers. If you have a lot of layers in your project and a lot of categorized or graduated legends, you can expand them out or collapse them back down with a single click.
- Last icon removes the layer from the project. You can also right click and remove a layer. Except the icon saves you one mouse click.
I know – nothing groundbreaking but it’s a project that keeps getting better with each release. It’s a piece of software that I’m starting clients on these days because not everyone has a commercial GIS desktop or can afford one. I’m working with a current client to build a dataset ( for a non profit) and QGIS is fine. We demo’d one day and started the next without waiting for grant approvals or paperwork to be written.
