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.

Many customers have requested an easy way to be notified when updates to LizardTech products are available. Today we launch a new RSS feed specifically for product updates at http://www.lizardtech.com/files/rss/updates.xml.

By subscribing, you’ll know when patches and new versions of LizardTech software are available.

You can view all of LizardTech’s RSS feeds at http://www.lizardtech.com/company/rss.php. Also, the LizardTech RSS feeds are able to be “auto discovered” by many RSS readers on any page of the LizardTech website.

Just a note to let folks know that LizardTech will be hosting a party at GameWorks in conjunction with GITA’s Geospatial Infrastructure Solutions Conference 31 taking place in Seattle March 9 - 12. It’s our way of saying “Welcome to our town”.

The party is from 6 p.m. to 8 p.m. Tuesday, March 11. We’ve reserved space on the second floor near the bar. LizardTech will provide food, two drink tickets per person and game cards for those interested in a little sport.

GameWorks is at 1511 Seventh Avenue, kittycorner from the Washington State Convention Center.

So after you’ve visited us at Booth #321 at the show on Tuesday, head on over to GameWorks and loosen your floor badge with the Lizards. We look forward to seeing you there.

Welcome to Zoom, the LizardTech community blog. Over the years we’ve been gratified and even a little surprised at the degree to which people we respect in the geospatial industry really do regard us as the imaging experts. We get asked what we think the best way is to implement this or that technology, often in situations where we’re reaching past our own experience and blazing new trails. Consequently we feel it’s high time we started a more visible dialog with the community we serve and are a part of.

Whence Zoom.

Zoom is the place where we want to get a better feel for what you as geospatial users and developers are thinking and what’s important to you, let you know a little more openly what we’re doing and thinking — along with some of the reasons why — and in general start conversations about whatever comes along in our space. (Speaking of our space, the photo above is of our digs near Pioneer Square in Seattle.)

We invite you to participate by commenting and sending us your thoughts. We hope to engage you in an ongoing dialog that will result in better understanding for all of us about our industry and the challenges facing it. We hope you’ll let us know if we get too full of ourselves. And we hope you’ll let us know what’s interesting to you, what you’d like to see in the tools that help you do your job, and just what the world looks like from your vantage point.

I’m Matt Fleagle, LizardTech’s tech writer. I’ll be gathering posts from Lizards in all parts of our company, some of whom may already be familiar to you. We’ll give you software tips, our impressions of industry happenings and conferences we attend, personal profiles and interviews, news about upcoming releases, and more. So zoom in with us!

See you at upper left…