I’ve been at LizardTech for almost five years now, and one thing that has always been (pleasingly) surprising to me is how much people like the plastic lizards we include with our software and give away at events. These little guys have been all over the world, and are so popular that we order them 50,000 at a time.

Last year at the ESRI International User Conference in San Diego we had a contest for you to “Show Us Your Lizards.” It was a great success; the winner brought in 31 unique LizardTech lizards from over the years. Everyone seemed to enjoy it, but the only problem was not everyone knew about it before the show started. Lots of people I spoke to at our booth said “Oh, I wish I would have known. I have dozens of them at home!”

Well, now’s your chance, because we’re doing it again. Take a look at our new contests for this year’s user conference, and show us your lizards this August in San Diego!

This week, LizardTech released the latest version of it’s GeoExpress SDK — a set of C++ libraries designed to make it easy for developers to add MrSID and JPEG 2000 support to their applications. Aside from the usual round of bug fixes and such, the big draw for this release is the number of platforms we’re now (some might say “finally”) supporting:

Windows

• Win32, VC7.1/32-bit
• Win32, VC8/32-bit
• Win32, VC8/64-bit
• Win32, VC9/32-bit
• Win32, VC9/64-bit

Linux

• RHEL3, gcc3.2.3, 32-bit
• RHEL3, gcc3.2.3, 64-bit
• RHEL5, gcc4.1, 32-bit
• RHEL5, gcc4.1, 64-bit

Solaris (SPARC)

• Solaris 8, v11 compiler suite
• Solaris 8, v11 compiler suite (64-bit)

Mac

• Mac OS 10.4 (Darwin8) / Universal (32-bit)
• Mac OS 10.5 (Darwin9) / Universal

That works out to about 13 different build configurations — yow! Remind me sometime to blog about Bob, our automated 24×7 build system…

Oh, and actually there’s one more reason to like this release: the license agreement has been made simpler, shorter, and more friendly to open source developers. While our SDK is not open source, we know a number of open source packages that wish to link it in or redistribute it, and we want to make that as simple as our lawyers will let us.