Still catching up the geonews that showed up during our holiday break, here’s the open source / open data geonews in batch mode. Open source geospatial software: Desktop virtual globes on their way out? Here’s WebGL Earth 2, “Open-source virtual planet web application running in any web browser with support for WebGL HTML5 standard” There’s Geocolor that we haven’t mentioned ...

Here’s the recent open source and open data geonews. On the software front: A new version, OpenGeo Suite 4.1 released Updated QGIS plugin for Semi-Automatic Classification Plugin v.3.0 “Rome” released OL3 is not with us yet, but that doesn’t mean we can’t have Editing in OpenLayers 3 using WFS-T Here’s to create Toner-lite styles for QGIS, similar to the ones ...

Geospatial technologies evolve quickly, here's a fresh comparison of web mapping API and libraries, Testing web map APIs - Google vs OpenLayers vs Leaflet.

From the conclusion: "Google, for example, can easily insert adverts into its maps without us knowing. Leaflet and OpenLayers, being open source, cannot. That said, if your aim is just to get attractive 'off the shelf' maps up quickly, Google Maps is a good option. OpenLayers is mature and big and works well with servers. Leaflet, as the new kid on the block is the most exciting for me and encapsulates many of the benefits of open source software in general: speed of development, flexibility, efficiency. [...] Lightness considered, for me that would mean Leaflet for many applications, but watch this space for the final version of OpenLayers3 (due very soon) and perhaps even better web mapping options."

Here's the recent geonews in batch mode. I've been struggling with many fires, I currently publish much less frequently than usual, but don't worry, everything major is in there!

From the open source / open data front:

• Dubbed as the Shapefile replacement, we discussed the GeoPackage standard several times, next week March 5 there's a webinar about it
• Certainly useful, GitHub adds visual history for maps, visualizing geojson updates directly on a map
• In case you missed the press release, open source 3D city platform ViziCities released on GitHub
• The power of open data, At Sochi Olympics, Crowdsourced OpenStreetMap Trounces Google Maps
• And if you wonder, Sochi was not mapped for Olympics and look at the nice maps you can do with open data - Sochi, with love
• News of OpenLayers 3 currently in beta 2, OpenLayers 3 Is Coming, Creating a custom build of OpenLayers 3 and there's even The book of OpenLayers3 is coming
• Using MapServer on Windows? Announcing MapServer MapManager 1.0
• In other updates, what's new in QGIS 2.2 which by itself could have deserved it's own entry, GeoTools 10.5 released and Rasterio 0.6
• Interesting entry on PostGIS bugs

From the Esri front:

• An article from readwrite, Esri Enables Federal Agencies To Open GIS Mapping Data To The Public
• We mentioned it last November, Introducing Esri’s Geotrigger Service: Welcome to the Future of Geofencing
• There's CityEngine key new features
• And What’s coming in ArcGIS Online March
• APB also offer Top 10 Take-Aways from the Opening Plenary of Esri’s Federal GIS Conference

From the Google front:

• Here's a very interesting article from Frank Taylor on the future of Google Earth, which apparently is being left aside in favor of Google Maps
• Google is Introducing Google Maps Gallery: Unlocking the World’s Maps
• The Canadian north in Street View, Wandering in the footsteps of the polar bear with Google Maps
• And it goes to India too, Discover the Taj Mahal and other iconic Indian monuments on Street View
• And a frequent topic, Monitoring the World's Forests with Global Forest Watch
• And if you don't like OpenStreetMap and open data, Expanding Google's Map Maker community in Southern and Eastern Europe
• A book review, Google Maps JavaScript API Cookbook
• Pretty nice and useful, Visualizing Google Search Results overlaid over 3D buildings

Discussed over Slashdot:

• DIY, Radar Expert Explains How To Cheaply Add Radar To Your Own Hardware Projects
• Video, not just photo anymore, New 360-Degree Video Capture Method Unveiled
• After autonomous cars, Terrafugia Wants Their Flying Car To Be Autonomous
• Don't tell me you're surprised, Lumia Phones Leaking Private Data To Microsoft
• That's not fun for their users,  Major Vulnerability In Tinder Dating App Allowed User [ Location ] Tracking
• Cellphone tracking, Death By Metadata: The NSA's Secret Role In the US Drone Strike Program
• And some of the time there's hope, ICE License-Plate Tracking Plan Withdrawn Amid Outcry About Privacy
• And there's the good uses, A New Use For Drones: Traffic Scouting
• Not surprising, Australian Police Deploy 3D Crime Scene Scanner
• A New Interactive Map For Understanding Global Flood Risks and here's a related article
• It's not going well for our oceans, 3D Maps Reveal a Lead-Laced Ocean
• It's actually from DigitalGlobe, Google Earth's New Satellites
• Car navigation, Dead Reckoning For Your Car Eliminates GPS Dead Zones
• And cars will chat together, Government To Require Vehicle-to-vehicle Communication

In the everything-else category:

• Interested in Lidar? Read LIDAR Format Wars: Towards an Open Future and it matters, Report predicts that low cost LiDAR will be disruptive in next 5 years, also related, LiDAR Data Quality Standards, Certification Discussed at LiDAR Forum Session
• Here's a list of Free GIS Apps on the Google Play Store
• Earlier this month, the 'father of GIS, Roger Tomlinson, passed away
• It has been a while since we discussed The State of CAD and GIS Integration
• A new article on What Skills Does A GIS Analyst Require
• An anniversary this month, Celebrating 25 Years of Not Getting Lost Thanks to GPS
• Groups on Earth Observations? What is GEO
• Microsoft, 15 New 3D Cities Available in the Bing Maps Preview App
• Law, California Appeals Court Rules State Law Doesn't Prohibit Driver Use of Smartphone Maps
• VIa OR, Mapping Twitter Topic Networks: From Polarized Crowds to Community Clusters
• Via OR, after iBeacons and many others, here's the Nokia Treasure Tag
• OGC news, OGC Activities and Mobile Industry Trends and the Candidate OGC IndoorGML standard available for public comment
• Amazing what you can do for fantasy locations, If Middle-Earth Were Real, These Exquisite Shots Would Be Its Vacation Brochure
• Here's a fake mapped town that became real, Agloe, the Paper Town Stronger than Fiction
• New online courses, New Geo MOOC: From GPS and Google Maps to Spatial Computing

In the maps category:

• Over Canadian national news website, there was a mention of the map of legal cannabis in the U.S.
• Syria over Wired, Hyperlocal Neighborhood Maps Reveal the Chaos in Aleppo
• Nice map, A Map of U.S. Intercity Bus and Train Routes
• The First online Global Freshwater Biodiversity Atlas

And thanks to Andrew Zolnai for his recent donation to Slashgeo, we wouldn't be there without the community!

Here what's probably our latest geonews in batch mode entry, have a nice holiday break!

From the open source / open data front:

• Boundless published a OpenLayers 3 & Google Maps API Compared
• Python and raster data? Introducing rasterio
• Here's an entry on the 25m European Digital Elevation Model (EU-DEM, Version 1)
• Much more efficient, OpenStreetMap's Redesign Goes Live! More Focused, More Inviting, More Map, and still on OSM data, Disability Mapping with OpenStreetMap
• In updates, GeoTools 10.3 Released and GeoServer 2.4.3 Released and MapGuide Open Source 2.5.2 and MapBox.js v1.5.0
• Beautiful, Using the 25m EU-DEM for shading OpenStreetMap layers

From the Esri front:

• A summary of What’s New in ArcGIS Online (December)
• Still breathing, ArcGIS 3.6 for Flex Released

From the Google front:

• Having kids? Join Santa and his elves in the countdown to Christmas Eve
• An entry telling you how to Create your own Street View
• The Bing Maps architect Blaise Aguera y Arcas is joining Google
• Google is improving maps in Building Better Maps in Brazil, Israel, and Russia
• You might be interested by National Geographic shares rich map content with the world via Google Maps Engine
• There's the classic, New Google Earth Imagery – December 6

In the everything-else category:

• If you haven't heard of the GeoPackage draft standard yet, read this, OGC's Geopackage standard enables geospatial data sharing for mobile devices
• Things do change, Open Geospatial Consortium updates its vision, mission, policies and procedures
• A new Eye in the Sky, First Images form Skybox’s SkySat-1 Released 
• An interesting read about How Can Geography Literacy Be So Bad At The Age Of Google Earth?
• Wired shares an entry named 6 Reasons to Get Over Your Fear of Coding and Start Making Better Maps
• The rise of GeoMedecine? A 10-minutes TED talk about named Your health depends on where you live
• Apple geo-related news:

  • Geofencing to Unlock Vehicle Functions Detailed in New Apple Patent Application

  • iBeacon Technology Tapped to Unlock Location-Specific Newsstand Content on iOS Devices and ​Apple Updates Apple Store App with Support for iBeacon Systems, but Apple is far from being alone in that race,  Qualcomm Launches 'Gimbal' Bluetooth LE iBeacon Competitor

• If you're not already convinced autonomous cars going to happen;
  • Ford Self-Driving R&D Car Tells Small Animal From Paper Bag At 200 Ft.

  • Nissan Leaf Prototype Becomes First Autonomous Car On Japanese Highways

  • Volvo Plans To Have Self-Driving Cars In Swedish City of Gothenburg By

• Geo and privacy:
  • If there was doubts, NSA Tracking Cellphone Locations Worldwide
  • An extreme scenario, Meet Jack, or What The Government Could Do With All That Location Data
  • But there are watchdogs? FTC Drops the Hammer On Maker of Location-Sharing Flashlight App
  • and hope, Boston Police Stop Scanning Registration Plates, For Now
  • but it's really everyone, Indiana State Police Acknowledge Use of Cell Phone Tracking Device
  • and sometimes it's good, New GPS Tracking Bullet May Render High-Speed Police Chases Obsolete
• Not that surprising, Need Directions? Might Not Want To Ask a Transit Rider
• We heard lots about drones, now it's time for SkyJack, a hacking system taking control of drones and the discussion on the topic, How To Hijack a Drone For $400 In Less Than an Hour - talking of Drones, that's impressive Drone Footage of Bangkok Protests
• In Canada? The new Canadian Geodetic Vertical Datum of (CGVD2013) recently launched
• Reality surpasses fiction once again, New MIT Camera Takes 3D Photos in the Dark
• You see, geospatial is evenin our heads! Memories Are ‘Geotagged’ With Spatial Information, Penn Researchers Say
• Underwater, First 3D topography of Great Barrier Reef derived from EO data
• A discussion about National GIS for India

In the maps category:

• Wired shares Some of the Year’s Best Images of Earth From Space, nice indeed
• Income distribution across the US, Census Bureau: Majority of Affluent Counties In Northeast US
• Here's a long review fo the Barrington Atlas iPad App
• Bitcoin? Coinmap – The Interactive Map Of Brick And Mortar Locations Accepting Bitcoins
• Wow, take a look at The “underwater waterfall” of Mauritius Island

The GeoExt community is proud to announce the release of GeoExt 2.0.0.

GeoExt 2.0.0 is the first official GeoExt version that is built atop of OpenLayers 2.13.1 and ExtJS 4.2.1. It is being released 2 weeks after release candidate 1 was published and no serious bugs were discovered.
The newest major version of GeoExt wants to provide mostly the same API you know and love from the 1.x-series. It comes with support for the autoloading-mechanism of ExtJS, support for the single-file build tool of sencha and with exhaustive documentation that is built using the same tools that the mother library ExtJs.
This release wouldn't have been possible without the sponsors of the above mentioned sprint. Also we want to thank the companies behind the contributors of GeoExt for supporting GeoExt development in numerous ways and for such a long time.
We invite you all to use GeoExt 2!

Here's the geonews in batch mode. Some of them may have deserved their own entry.

On the open source / open data front:

• OpenLayers 2.13.1 has been released, but arguably more exciting is OpenLayers 3.0 - alpha.2, they're getting closer
• W3C is Launching the Open Data Directory
• Introducing GeoServer Enterprise, it's GeoServer with long term support releases and more
• Here's the FOSS4G-CEE Bucharest, Romania final thoughts
• Montreal's public transport organization adopted OpenStreetMap for their maps, another example of how mature enough OSM has become
• Nokia uses the open source CartoDB to show off traffic data
• Good news, California Supreme Court Says GIS Data are Public Data

On the Esri front:

• It was the Esri User Conference this week, you can read Geoff's 3D and other themes of this year's conference entry
• Jack Dangermond explaining How Esri Hit $912 Million in Sales, very interesting, including: "One thing that has made us so successful is that we've never taken outside investment. That means we can concentrate on what our customers want--not what the stockholders or the VCs want. That's a strategic advantage."
• You'll find a lot lot more on the Esri blog for the International User Conference
• New imagery for Esri tools, DigitalGlobe and community imagery added to the World Imagery map
• ArcGIS Online just got more advantageous, Get More with ArcGIS Online – Announcing Subscription Savings

On the Google front:

• Google announced their new Google Maps app for smartphones and tablets
• Also over Slashdot, Google Updates Maps, Makes First Stable Chrome Release Using WebKit Fork
• Rest reassured, the iOS Enhanced Google Maps App with iPad Support 'Coming Soon'
• Unsurprisingly, there was New Google Earth Imagery – July 8

Geo-related news discussed over Slashdot:

• Microsoft Reveals Its 3D Printing Strategy For Windows 8.1
• 3 GLONASS-M GNSS satellites destroyed, Russian Rocket Proton-M Crashes At Launch
• MapBox is aiming at nothing less than Real Time Imagery via MapBox Satellite Live
• But that's clearly the beginning, read APB's entry named Real-Time Data is Really Here ... Kind of, Almost
• Again, City-Sized Ice Shelf Breaks Free Of Antarctica
• New Zealand ISP Offers "Global Mode" So Users Can Circumvent Geo-Restrictions
• Something we discussed before, Automated Plate Readers Let Police Collect Millions of Records On Drivers
• UCSD Lecturer Releases Geotagging Application For "Dangerous Guns and Owners"

In the miscellaneous category:

• Interesting, O'Reilly shares news about Sifted, a 7-minutes animation set in a cloud points world, geo-geeky
• A Newly Published Apple Mapping Patent Details Route Feedback System, Real-Time Accident Reporting
• O'Reilly mentions Cricket, an indoor location system from MIT, but the latest news appear to be from
• If you're into Minecraft, you'll like Hangouts with James Fee:: Professional Minecraft GIS
• Here's starting points regarding Cross Platform Development with Bing Maps and PhoneGap
• In the U.S., Round-the-clock GPS tracking of state worker ‘unreasonable’ (via SL)

In the maps category:

• A series of maps on Who Serves in the U.S. Military? Mapping Enlisted Troops and Officers
• Here's Midtown Manhattan Growth Animation (1850-2015) and Toronto Growth Animation (1834-2013) and San Francisco Growth Animation (1877-2015) and Calgary Growth Animation (1892-2016)
• Now available, a New global ESA Vegetation Map