Everything I’m about to tell you you should probably forget – in my brief experience with it, Eclipse makes for an inferior alternative to Qt Creator if you are looking for a GUI to do development on QGIS with. That said, there are those for whom Eclipse is their weapon of choice. My primary motivation for testing eclipse was that I wanted to use the Eclipse refactoring tools which in days of yore when I did a lot of Java programming proved to be the IDE’s saving grace. I wanted the refactoring tools because for QGIS 2.0 we are planning an API cleanup and I was hoping that it would make the process easier. Ok so let’s dive in (read on after the break for details)

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Running a small business is a challenge. I came into this as a FOSS geek with a grandiose plan of spreading the FOSS GIS goodness far and wide and somehow earning a living from it. I don’t have an MBA or any significant business skills so I have been learning everything from first principles as I go along. Using Scrum project management has been a huge step forward for us and has been instrumental on us creating a much more effective work process within the office. The next biggest challenge we have faced on our journey is how to motivate and get the best out of our staff. Having staff is a double edged sword in a small business – they can boost your productivity and earning power, but they also cost a lot of money and time (training and supervision). One of the things we do with our staff is have a bonus system whereby a percentage of their salary is dependent on performance. This theoretically motivates them to work harder to achieve their maximum earning power.

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I’ve been a VIM user for many years and over that time I have tweaked my vimrc a little (not too much mind you). I have one modification that I use probably hundreds of times a day.

" Added by Tim to map alt-left/right to flip through buffers
nmap <A-Left> :bp<CR>
nmap <A-Right> :bn<CR>

Adding the above to your ~/.vimrc file will let you quickly hop between buffers – pressing alt-right arrow will take you to the next buffer and pressing alt-left arrow will take you to the previous buffer.

So my previous article about fusing QGIS Desktop with web technologies generated quite a bit of interest, including some people interested to start hacking on it (always a good sign). In this article I want to show the next level of functionality we can obtain by means of a simple example. There won’t be any flashy graphics here but hopefully it will give you inspiration for other things we can do.

Here is the executive summary and a quick video to demonstrate it:

• I replaced Metadata tab in the QGIS Raster Layer Properties with a QWebView widget
• I created a simple web page that accepts a C++ QgsRasterLayer object and then does stuff with it
• I implemented a Q_PROPERTY on QgsMapLayer (the base class for all map layers) that exposed the metadata property as a read-only property.
• I created a customised BluePrint CSS template (using a narrower format than the traditional 960 grid) and deployed it in QGIS resources
• I added a simple button  to the form and used a bit of jquery and javascript to call a slot on the QgsRasterLayer and retrieve its min and max scale properties, then update the page

If you’ve tried centering table cell contents in xhtml2pdf, you’ve probably noticed that it doesn’t work.  The typical symptoms seem to be that cell contents are right against (or even over) the upper border of the cell.

For reasons unknown, xhtml2pdf ignores “vertical-align” instructions, so you can’t use that.  To solve the problem, I did this:

table th, td {
  padding-top: 3px;
  padding-bottom: 2px;
  line-height: 50%;
}

You may want to add some more to this for the sake of appearance, but that’s the gist of it.

Building a wizard in designer is overly complex and has a few pitfalls. This is especially the case when you try to build your wizard using Qt4 Designer exclusively. The main problem comes in due to the fact that although you can happily place any widgets you like onto a QWizardPage, in the QWizard you cannot actually access them at run time. So that makes it useful for adding static content like labels or text but pretty challenging for everything else. A while ago I implemented a welcome wizard for QGIS but never actually applied it trunk. Today I had occasion to dust off the cobwebs and I thought I would write this up to explain how I did it since you won’t find much help on Google on the matter.

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