I’m off to the 2nd QGIS hackfest event in Vienna in a week’s time. I decided to skip the expensive trip to FOSS4G2009 in Sydney this year and go to the QGIS hackfest rather. Many thanks to the sponsors and donors who have made my travel and accommodation for the QGIS hackfest expenses possible. There are also several other developers who will be receiving support for their travel costs. If you are sitting on a pile of cash you have no idea what to do with, why not wonder over to the QGIS Sponsorship page and sponsor or donate to the project. We have already raised 74% of our EUR5000 target which is absolutely brilliant – it would be great to see that figure go up to 100%!

The last few weeks have seen a lot of interesting activity taking place in QGIS. I finally committed the render caching stuff that I have been playing with for a little while which greatly speeds up layer re-ordering and various other activities – especially when working with large datasets. Juergen has been a ‘bug fixing machine’ as usual and adding many nifty new features. A few weeks back he added query / subsetting support for shapefiles, and in the last few days he added support for multiple svg directories – which I added a gui for today so that arbitary svg directories could be used. At the same time Marco has been augmenting the already excellent digitising tools and working away on the print composer. All this beavering away at the codebase makes me really excited to be attending the code fest and even more excited about the upcoming 1.4 release (which we will do after the hackfest). Oh here is a little screenie of QGIS rendering with some svg icons out of my Gnome icon directory:

Anyway back to the grindstone, can’t wait for next week…