Hi, I'm back again from another FOSSGeo training on a remote town in the Philippines. For a bit of background, we conducted a five-day basic GIS training to a local government unit who is building its staff capacity in using GIS for landuse planning and monitoring of LGU initiated projects. The town is very remote and internet is non-existent.
Some observations and requests (?): 1. Most of the core functionality of QGIS is complete enough for basic GIS operations. However, you miss half of QGIS's power if you don't have the cool user contributed plugins installed. Since internet is not available in this town, what I did is to simply copy my plugins folder into the other computers so that they can use some of it. A cool feature would be an offline cache of all core and 3rd party plugins. I don't know how this works, but basically a possibility for a single laptop to connect to the internet and then update QGIS plugins (including all dependencies). Back to the town office, he/she can then copy the offline cache repo to other computers. Similar to an offline debian repo. 2. After the initial install in windows (a mix of XP, Vista and Win7 machines), when opening a vector layer, the default directory it points to is the installed "Program Files/Quantum ..." directory. It would be nice if it defaults to either the "GIS Database" created directory or at least to the user's "My Documents" 3. They had some difficulty in the deleting vectors during editing. Within the "Digitizing" toolbox, you can select a vector line and the node tool to edit/delete the nodes/vertices. However, to delete a line, you need to highlight a line using the "Select Feature" (this tool is in the "Attribute" toolbox group ) and then the "Delete Selected" (in the "Digitizing" toolbox). Note that the "Select Feature" is not within the "Digitizing". Normally, the users tried to find the "Select Feature" within the "Digitizing' group icons. 4. The best feature they liked is the possibility to plot and see field collected photos in the map view. Using a GPS and digital camera we geotagged the photo using another external program. Then using photo2shape and evis plugin to visualize the photo location and the photo itself. What's missing so far is the integration of geotagging (writing the lat/lon into the exif) as another plugin. Overall, the participants are very satisfied with QGIS and they are happy knowing that they can distribute and install the app to as many computers within the town office (actually, the cost of the 5days training is not even half of what an single arc license costs). :) -- cheers, maning ------------------------------------------------------ "Freedom is still the most radical idea of all" -N.Branden wiki: http://esambale.wikispaces.com/ blog: http://epsg4253.wordpress.com/ ------------------------------------------------------ _______________________________________________ Qgis-user mailing list Qgis-user@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/qgis-user