Today Safe Software released FME 2009. I’ve was unable to take the 2009 beta for a spin (being busy is a good thing these days), but there are three new formats supported that really have me excited; CityGML 1.0, Adobe Geospatial PDF and OpenStreetMap XML (come to think of it Autodesk 3ds support might come in handy at the old architecture studio). Plus the 20% performance increase over FME 2008 will be a welcome change of pace from software that gets slower as it “improves”. The improved user interface of Workbench should increase usability for those who are used to other geoprocessing software packages. Safe has a “What’s Great” brochure available that outlines the improvements in more detail.
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James Fee - jfee@weogeo.com
James works for WeoGeo helping people organize, share and monetize their geo-content.
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4 Comments
maybe this explains why I can’t get anyone from sales to call me….too busy releasing a new version.
@JW, One thing we’re rarely accused of is being a sales-driven company! In the early days Don and I would just offer folks interested in buying another evaluation so we could keep developing… Anyway, very sorry about your experience, we do have a dedicated sales team and if you drop me an email at dale.lutz at safe.com I’ll a) make sure someone gets back to you and b) offer you a longer evaluation, just for old times sake.
@James/others — I’m very interested in what applications people come up with for the Geospatial PDF output. In many ways I think this is the sleeper addition to FME this time around, that has a wide range of interesting applications. Not quite as big a deal as what KML did to allow publishing of geospatial to the masses, but in a similar league. So if any of you have a chance to give it a spin, let me know how it works out for you. We’re already looking at a number of additional enhancements to this format (you can’t stop progress) and I’d be interested in what your applications would benefit from.
will your GeoPDF enable all the features, or do we still have to pay the Adobe toll to simply open/save/close in Acrobat Pro?
@JW — with what we provide, you get the Object Data tool, and the Geospatial Location Tool when the PDFs are displayed with Acrobat Reader 9. And of course the ability to turn layers off and on.
We write out the coordinate system of the data in a way that the PDF understands. It is true that if you want to do Measuring and Commenting, you need to do the open/close with Acrobat Pro. Which, as far as we can determine, is the same situation if you use ArcGIS directly to produce Geospatial PDFs.