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!

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!

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…

We Lizards like to keep busy and we like to share the products we develop with the geospatial industry, because…well…geospatial users are just so appreciative! Hard on the heels of the release of Express Server 7, which can be installed as a 64-bit application and features support for MG4 imagery, LizardTech has unveiled the MG4 Plug-in for ArcGIS 10 Desktop.

MG4 was created to support multispectral imagery and alpha-band transparency, and it is the fourth generation of LizardTech’s MrSID format. It has been met with enthusiasm by both end-users and developers. And the new MG4 Plug-in gives users of Esri products support for multi- and hyperspectral imagery compressed to MrSID format within the applications they use every day.

And, it’s free!

Let us know what other products you’d like to see that would make your job easier. We take our customers’ feedback seriously.

You can download the MG4 Plug-in for ArGIS 10 Desktop here.

At this year’s Esri User Conference we asked our customers, who love our plastic lizards almost as much as they love our software products, to submit a story either about their experience with GeoExpress or about lizards — live or plastic — and we’d pick a winning story from each pile. We got a lot of amazing stories.

Okay, Tyrannosaurus is not a lizard in the scientific sense, and none of the stories were about T. Rex.

Thank you to everyone who participated.The authors of the two stories we selected as our favorites each win an iPad.

With a classic narrative of struggle and triumph that we never get tired of, Matthew Woodworth of TranSystems in Kansas City, Missouri writes:

My organization deals with fairly large amounts of raster data, and a very small storage budget.  About 2 years ago we were confronted with the situation that, not only had our server dedicated to store our raster data become completely full, but we had nearly 1Tb of GeoTIFF data provided by a client sitting on an external hard drive and nowhere to store it on the network. 

We looked at quite a few options to fix the issue including expanding our network storage, when we came across GeoExpress by LizardTech. My IT department was very impressed at the idea of compressing existing data to reduce storage space and I, being the GIS department head for my organization, had used MrSID files for years and loved the idea of not being forced to store my data offline.

We decided to purchase GeoExpress Unlimited and have never regretted it. I went from exceeding my server capacity by 25% to having nearly 65% free space afterwards without losing any information. As of the date of this letter I have not quite utilized 50% of my capacity after over a year’s worth of adding data.

Thank you LizardTech.

And from Thomas Hardy’s own Wessex region in England, Andy Nicholson of Wessex Water in Bath asks the thrilling question:

My GeoExpress Lizards – Thiefs in the Night or Innocent Bystanders?

Every quarter we complete MrSID conversions for distribution across the GIS fileservers. Last year in the office not only did we notice we were getting older – our recollection of the required settings for MrSID file creation had got so bad they had to be written down – but we also started to doubt our own sanity. It all started when someone left a Mars bar on my desk. The next morning we all noticed it showed signs of being nibbled by some small creature. We also noticed that the two LizardTech lizards that sit atop my screen – one green the other green and orange – had swapped sides.

For several days we observed they moved sides and each tasty treat we left for the “thief in the night” was nibbled or eaten completely. It was time to catch the culprits “red clawed”. We positioned a web cam to capture the crime scene. For a couple of nights nothing, then one night much to our relief we caught the thief in action:

In flagrante delicto.

The LizardTech lizards were proven innocent. Mind you, to this day we don’t know how the lizards changed sides on top of my screen.

Congratulations to Andy and Matthew. And again, thanks to all who sent us stories. We’ll see you again at next year’s user conference if not sooner!