Editor’s Note: Genie wrote this weeks ago and we meant to post it right away, but we dropped the ball (“we” being an unidentified editorial entity who may or may not have the initials MF).

Sacramento! Image courtesy of Robert Parker.

A handful of us Lizards attended the ASPRS conference in Sacramento last week. Here are some of the highlights:

Monday evening – ASPRS reception. LizardTech was one of the sponsors for this at Fat’s Catering in Old Downtown Sacramento. Great appetizers, great drinks and good company.

Tuesday morning – Show floor opened at 10:30. Terry Ryan and I popped across the street to pay a visit to the USACE in Sacramento. It went great. We had a good-sized group turn out and were able to discuss products and workflow for a couple hours.

Tuesday evening – The vendor reception was from 5:30 – 7:30 on the show floor.

Wednesday – Wyoming DOT came by the booth for a pre-arranged visit to drop off a sample dataset that we then compressed with GeoExpress and threw into Express Server for delivery via WMS all in a matter of minutes while they were standing at the booth – which is something we will do for anyone interested in finding out how quickly and easily they can use our products with their data.

Thursday – Washington DNR came by the booth to invite us down for a visit to their office once we got back from the conference to discuss workflows. Located in Olympia, they are just a short one-hour drive for us from the LizardTech office in downtown Seattle.

ASPRS is a great show for us to meet with others in the industry, maintain existing relationships, and cultivate new ones. Thanks for all who stopped by and took the time to say hello. We hope you enjoyed the show and look forward to seeing you at the 2013 ASPRS annual conference in Maryland.

I can hardly keep up with developments to talk about here. A few weeks ago we released version 8.5 of our MrSID SDK, an update that adds support for per-band decoding. Per-band decoding means that LizardTech’s partners and customers now have the ability to decode only the bands that they need from multi- and hyperspectral imagery, which can greatly improve decode and viewing performance.

The new version also supports several additional platforms, including iOS 4.0, both 32- and 64-bit versions. I had it on my list to blog about that, but now ClearTrust, a Reston-Va.-based company that develops geospatial tools for the Macintosh and iOS devices, has already used our SDK to integrate support for the latest version of MrSID (MG4) into version 1.2 of its CartoMobile® field data entry and visualization application, so that CartoMobile users can now view MrSID imagery on devices such as iPhone and iPad. That’s bound to make iOS loyalists happy.

There’s good news particularly for Linux users, too. The new version of the MrSID SDK supports Red Hat 6, both 32- and 64-bit versions. For more information about the MrSID SDK go to www.lizardtech.com and log in to our Developer website at the bottom of the page.