geoLibro.org

Nobody needs me to monitor news about geotagging, but I have to mention that it’s finally gotten very easy to tag photos with spatial attributes on a Mac. Like it should be. Ogle Earth reports that iPhotoToGoogleEarth’s Craig Stanton has recently and quickly taken advantage of AppleScript support in Google Earth. The result is a small .app called Geotagger that takes a dragged image and ascribes coordinates to its exif fields based on where your also-running Google Earth is centered. Very easy, and a great, great way to tag photos (if you don’t already have a GPS track available to sync to).

And it works, too. Below this is a screencap of four shows’ worth of album art from Tom Waits’ tour through the midwest/east. It proves Geotagger works, yes, but it also reinforces my disappointment at not being able to attend any of these shows (I was busy starting a new job, see, and traveling across the country). I’m almost the centroid of the polygon these four corners would create.

(I’m practicing to be a headline writer for The Post.) Once again I’m proved ignorant. DataFerrett, the Census data extraction app, is available for the Mac. I have no idea how long this has been true, but I most certainly hadn’t seen it before (I’m not clear on the versioning, but the Mac page says they’re testing 1.3.2 right now. The launcher .app is at .1). It’s a Java app, so don’t expect it to look great, but it does work. And quite frankly? Even if it didn’t work it’s encouraging to see the attention. They’ve even included a .mov of DataFerrett at work on a Mac (see Poster Frame, below); I guess to prove they’re not joking.

No word on a Linux version, and Linux doesn’t even make it into the FAQ, but still…

Get DataFerrett for Mac here.

Beginning with The Earth is Square’s post about Geody, a different kind of search engine (that just so happens to be geographic, with results available as WorldWind, Google Earth, Celestia, and Stellarium, I’m collecting a couple of like items into this one post. Next up is a new[?] (WW2D beta 0.99.88). I’m ashamed to say I lost track of this one, thought it was dead. Apparently it’s not, however, and if you’re willing to install your own JOGL libraries you’ll have a new, improved WorldWind-ish GES on your hands. Even if you have a Mac.

And I guess the only other thing was Celestia, another project I hadn’t kept up with. (Wanna know why? Because anything without an RSS feed is dead to me.) Anyway, it’s also available on Macs (not sure about the Intel issue), if you’re interested.

Mac users, if you still find OpenOffice to be a little Windows-y and NeoOffice to be a heavy, lumbering oaf, you might be interested in Tables. (I’m too lazy to look it up, but wasn’t there a rumor of an Apple-made spreadsheet program of this name a year ago or more?) Anyway, it opens Excel files, so your business jerk friends won’t get mad at you for requesting a different format, but it feels like a Mac app. I haven’t done much with it yet, but it launches in two seconds, so I don’t doubt it will be my default spreadsheet app for the next 30 days (it’s in public beta as a 30-day trial).

From Christian Spanring: Rather than “go out and play minigolf,” Spanring set up a MacBook to run ArcGIS. I confess I’m a little disappointed I haven’t heard more excitement about this possibility in particular (within the greater cloud of excitement about Windows running on Apple machines), but nonetheless I am personally thrilled to hear this will work. Later this year I hope to receive delivery of my own MacBook Pro and you can be damned sure ArcGIS is going to be one of the first things I try (everything else I know works). I’ve spoken with another ArcGIS user via a listserv and we’re both very hungry for this type of news. I love the ethos of GRASS and I appreciate its power very much, but it just isn’t a fluid experience for people who are new to GIS. It’s a hard sell, to be sure. And using ArcGIS with the benefit of Exposé and the rest of the OS X UI? Swell.