nyalldawson.net » Nyall Dawson

I just realised that the tagline of this site still stated “MapBasic”, amongst other things. It’s been a good 4+ years since I last touched that abomination of a language, so it’s well an...

http://nyalldawson.net/2018/12/site-update/

Last week the first official “FOSS4G/SOTM Oceania” conference was held at Melbourne University. This was a fantastic event, and there’s simply no way I can extend sufficient thanks to all t...

http://nyalldawson.net/2018/11/thoughts-on-foss4g-sotm-oceania-2018-and-the-pyqgis-api-improvements-which-it-caused/

Last week we kicked off the first (of hopefully many) Australian QGIS hackfests Developers Meetings. It was attended by 3 of the core QGIS development team: Nathan Woodrow, Martin Dobias and myse...

http://nyalldawson.net/2017/05/the-inaugural-qgis-australia-hackfest-noosa-2017/

A lot of cartographers have a love/hate relationship with label halos. On one hand they can be an essential technique for improving label readability, especially against complex background layers...

http://nyalldawson.net/2017/04/about-label-halos/

It’s been a long time since I last blogged here. Let’s just blame that on the amount of changes going into QGIS 3.0 and move on… One new feature which landed in QGIS 3.0 today is a processi...

http://nyalldawson.net/2017/02/new-map-coloring-algorithms-in-qgis-3-0/

I’ve recently spent some time optimising the performance of various QGIS plugins and algorithms, and I’ve noticed that there’s a few common performance traps which developers fall into when...

http://nyalldawson.net/2016/10/speeding-up-your-pyqgis-scripts/

Last week I posted regarding some thoughts I’ve had recently concerning what I perceive as a general confusion about how QGIS is developed and how users can successfully get things to change i...

http://nyalldawson.net/2016/08/how-to-effectively-get-things-changed-in-qgis-a-follow-up/

I’ve been heavily involved in the open source QGIS mapping project for a number of years now. During this time I’ve kept a close watch on the various mailing lists, issue trackers, stackex...

http://nyalldawson.net/2016/08/how-to-effectively-get-things-changed-in-qgis/

In part 3 of my exploration of variables in QGIS 2.12, I’m going to dig into how variables are scoped in QGIS and what layer level variables are available (you can read parts 1 and 2 for a gene...

http://nyalldawson.net/2015/12/exploring-variables-in-qgis-pt-3-layer-level-variables/

Following on from part 1 in which I introduced how variables can be used in map composers, I’d like to now explore how using variables can make it easier to manage your QGIS projects. As a quic...

http://nyalldawson.net/2015/12/exploring-variables-in-qgis-pt-2-project-management/