Cleaner, More Flexible Python Map Viewing (Shallow Thoughts)

Cleaner, More Flexible Python Map Viewing

A few months ago, someone contacted me who was trying to use my PyTopo map display script for a different set of map data, the Topo! National Parks series. We exchanged some email about the format the maps used.

I'd been wanting to make PyTopo more general anyway, and already had some hacky code in my local version to let it use a local geologic map that I'd chopped into segments. So, faced with an Actual User (always a good incentive!), I took the opportunity to clean up the code, use some of Python's support for classes, and introduce several classes of map data.

I called it 0.5 beta 1 since it wasn't well tested. But in the last few days, I had occasion to do some map exploring, cleaned up a few remaining bugs, and implemented a feature which I hadn't gotten around to implementing in the new framework (saving maps to a file).

I think it's ready to use now. I'm going to do some more testing: after visiting the USGS Open House today and watching Jim Lienkaemper's narrated Virtual Tour of the Hayward Fault, I'm all fired up about trying again to find more online geologic map data. But meanwhile, PyTopo is feature complete and has the known bugs fixed. The latest version is on the PyTopo page.

Tags: programming, python, gtk, pygtk, mapping
[ 18:25 Jun 03, 2006    More programming | permalink to this entry | ]