You may already have heard, but now you can view imagery compressed to MrSID and JPEG 2000 formats on your iPad. Folks in the industry are excited and we’re already getting positive feedback about the functionality this application brings to users. Glenn Letham at GISuser picked up our news item today and Matt Ball at Spatial Sustain even wrote a little thing about how the app extends image portability. Thanks guys!

Here are some of GeoViewer’s intuitive, easy-to-use features:

• Open MrSID and JPEG 2000 images.
• Select bands to view from a multispectral image.
• Explore imagery by panning, zooming and zooming out.
• Add vector overlays (Esri Shapefiles and KML files) to get more out of image layers.
• Center on your GPS location so you can see what’s nearby.
• Measure the distance between a series of points.
• Identify geolocation by touching on any image.
• View layer properties, including coordinate reference system, geo bounding box, dimensions, colorspace, datatype, and resolution.
• Search by geographic coordinates in WGS 84 (Lat/Long) or the image’s native coordinate reference system.
• Set viewing preferences (band selection, layer line color, etc.).

The GeoViewer application for iPad is free and can be downloaded from the iTunes App Store. Get busy!

Folks, we’d like to introduce you to a new Lizard. Travis Applegate joined us before the holidays as our inside sales support rep, renewing licenses for our existing customers. He fits right in here — we put him through an ordeal by fire at our holiday white elephant gift exchange and he came through with flying colors — and we think you’ll like him, too.

New Lizard Travis Applegate.

Travis is a Portland native who’s spent some effort trying to find the city that’s the right fit for him. He found Portland a touch confining, while Chicago had a little too much echo (and snow). He settled in Seattle, where he has worked for the Cobalt Group as an order manager, the University of Phoenix as an enrollment counselor, and Seattle Weekly as an account executive. Since the Weekly’s offices are directly above us (in fact, from a geospatial viewpoint he works in the exact same position in the building as he did before, just fifteen feet lower on the Z axis), we can tease him that coming to us represents a downward move. That’s not the way Travis sees it, though, and we’re glad to have him on our team as he brings enthusiasm and dedication and his sales and other experience to the job.

Travis is big into music in many forms, but in particular live shows and vinyl records. His prize platter is London Calling by The Clash — he would prefer it if it were the UK import first pressing, which it’s not, but since it’s his favorite album in any format he still ranks it at the top. He also loves to dabble with musical instruments and jokes that he has failed to master a great many of them. He also likes to get out into the woods and mountains and other remote places, proximity to which is one reason he cites for having hunkered down here in Seattle, where, in case you haven’t heard, we’re surrounded by mountain ranges, islands, bodies of water, and forests.

Welcome to the team, Travis!

LizardTech has become a member of the British Association of Remote Sensing Companies (BARSC).

BARSC is an industry association dedicated to the promotion of the interests of all commercial companies involved with remote sensing technology throughout the United Kingdom.

In a press release we released earlier this month in which we said some nice things about BARSC and they said some nice things about us, we noted that we’ll be getting invitations to events that in the past have included presentations from senior staff of ESA, the UK Space Agency, NCEO, and the like. That alone has got us pretty excited. But add to that the detailed information about industry goings on, plus eligibility to attend the renowned BARSC Annual Lunch, and we’re in RSSH (remote sensing seventh heaven!).

Membership in BARSC is open to all remote sensing organisations (notice the Brit spelling — wink wink) with offices in the United Kingdom. That describes us to a teacup. LizardTech’s London EMEA office is run and managed by geo-sales and marketing agency Quarry One Eleven.

Look for us in the green and pleasant land!

I saw this post from Gizmodo about a potential hard drive shortage and it got me thinking. Everyone talks about storage being cheap, but when you consider how much storage has to be purchased for imagery, not to mention the associated backup, power, and management cost, it adds up to more money than people think. Now combine that with a possible shortage of storage, and it’s a good reminder that compression is very much a part of today’s business strategy.

Just when you were saying to the person in the next cubicle “I don’t see how they could make GeoExpress any better”, along comes GeoExpress 8.5. We’ve been listening to our customers’ feedback again, and one of the things many of our customers asked for was the ability to compress image bands individually.

Done.

We’re still listening.

The latest version of GeoExpress not only enables you to select which bands from a multispectral input image you want to include — and in which order — in your output MG4 file, but allows you to compress individual bands or even groups of bands at specified ratios. So, for example, for MG4 output you can compress the R, G and B bands of your 8-banded source image at 20:1 if you want, while leaving the other five bands lossless. We call these features “band selection” and “per-band compression” and we’re sure that anyone using multispectral imagery will find them to be useful advancements.

There’s more. We streamlined our Coordinate Reference System selection tool so that specifying a CRS for source and output images is easier and takes less time. And for those of you administrating GeoExpress with a license server and floating licenses, version 8.5 gives you greater control over your licenses by allowing you to specify how many of your floating licenses can be checked out as commuters and taken off the network. We also fixed some stuff — you know, little under-the-hood things you probably don’t care about (they’re listed in the Readme file if you do).

All in all, we’re pretty pleased with GeoExpress 8.5, and we’re eager for you to take it out for a drive and tell us what you think. Get the trial download at http://www.lizardtech.com/downloads/trials.php or contact your LizardTech representative.

Okay, NOW we think its impossible for GeoExpress to get any better. Of course, we haven’t yet finished reading our latest batch of customer mail…