a question about my mapviewer program

[Chris Barker]

Russel,

Russell Nelson wrote:
> I've been working on a nifty neato GIS application called 'mapviewer'.

Very cool!
> Is ANYBODY else besides myself interested in using Terraserver maps?

Maybe.

> In being able to edit layers?

Absolutely!

I would love to see you do this as an extension to Thuban, rather than a 
separate app. One reason is that I personally prefer wxPython to GTK 
anyway (as I need Windows and OS-X support, which I think is better with 
wxPython), but the main issue is that I want to do something similar anyway.

I'm hoping to be able to use Thuban as the basis for a special purpose 
mapping program. What I need to do is be able to load various base maps, 
generally either topos or nautical charts, and be able to draw stuff on 
top of them, like lines and polygons, etc. I also need to be able to 
load geo-data in custom vector formats. It looks like Thuban is already 
well set up for loading the various data I need, so now I need a way to 
create and edit vector data in it, and that sounds like just what you 
want to do to.

I suppose I could take what you've done and work from that, (wxPython 
vs., GTK aside), but it seems to me that Thuban already has solved a lot 
of problems with file formats, projections, fast rendering of vector 
data, etc, so why not use it?

By the way, I have written a little mapping engine myself, for wxPython, 
but it doesn't support raster data. Rather than adding that support, I'm 
hoping to adapt Thuban to my needs. Mine is called FloatCanvas (I use it 
for other data that aren't maps as well) it is now part of the wxPython 
demo/lib, or you can get it here:

http://home.comcast.net/~chrishbarker/FloatCanvas

-Chris

-- 
Christopher Barker, Ph.D.
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Chris.Barker at noaa.gov