[Thuban-announce] Thuban development release 1.1.0

[Jan-Oliver Wagner]

GIS-Viewer Thuban: First development release towards 1.2 available 

Thuban is a platform independent interactive viewer for geographic
data·layers.
The first development release 1.1.0 towards the next stable release
series is ready for download as source code package. 

The changes compared to release 1.0.1 include: 

* Add some support for wxPython 2.5 and 2.6. Thuban is still compatible
  with wxPython 2.4. 

* Change the way thuban deals with non-ascii text. The internal
  representation is now the user's default encoding. Thuban works a bit
  better with a unicode build of wxPython but there are still problems. 

* Various raster data improvements. Among other things, translucent images
  are now supported on a sufficiently recent wxWidgets (2.6). Also, only
  the part of the window actually covered by the image is drawn which
  means you canhave many raster images concurrently. Improved performance
  of map rendering for raster layers (by about a factor of 2 and even more
  when zoomed to small extents, measured for the Iceland demo). 

* Improved PostGIS support: 
  * Tables don't have to have a column named "gid" anymore. The user can
    select the column to use for ids. 
  * PostgreSQL views are supported too. 
  * Support more PostgreSQL versions. 7.4 works now. 

* Added support for sizable points. 

* The middle mouse button can be used for panning now. 

* Give a warning when the projection selected for a layer is probably
  wrong. 
* Updated shapelib. 

* Minimum version of GDAL now 1.2.5. 

* A registry for extensions. 

* New or improved extensions: 
  * Improved WMS extension. 
  * New Extension to dump bounding boxes of all shapes of the selected
    layer. 
  * New extension: umn_mapserver for managing UMN MapServer projects. 
  * New extension: OGR for using the ogr library in order to load various
    datasource formats. 
  * New Extension: mouseposition. Tool to collect mouse click positions (map
    coordinates) in a dialog. 

* Documentation: 
  * Added some documentation of the internals of Thuban. See Doc/technotes/ 
  * The Thuban manual has been partly translated to German