Wednesday 30 April 2014

Announcing: MapGuide Maestro 6.0 Alpha 1

It has been 4 years since I took over development of MapGuide Maestro. In those 4 years, Maestro has evolved to the point where I now believe that for a MapGuide Server authoring application, the design space of Maestro in my opinion, has been mostly fully explored. There isn't really much left for me to do

So as I see it, 6.0 will be my final major release of Maestro. Since this is going to be my final release, we should release early and often so that when 6.0 does finally drop, it will be what I consider to be complete and finished. The road to MapGuide Maestro 6.0 will be my "farewell tour" for this piece of software.

So with that said, here's the first alpha release of MapGuide Maestro 6.0. Here's what's new

New Grid-based Style Editor

A new grid-based style editor replaces the existing control-based style editor.


The old control-based style editor can be restored through the Maestro options. Note: In my tests on Mono, the new grid-based editor does not work, so you'll have to revert back to the old style editor.



Web Layout v2.6.0

The new Web Layout schema has specialized editor support in anticipation of the release of MapGuide Open Source 2.6.



Theming improvements

You can now generate themes based on values from an external Class Definition (eg. A lookup table)



Also, you can now also generate LOOKUP() theme expressions via the Expression Editor. This can be accessed from the Tools menu of the Expression Editor and uses the existing Theme Builder UI.




You can also generate themes for composite styles as well (in most cases).

Advanced Stylization improvements

Thanks to the grid-based style editor, you can now see such style previews inline.



Also we've made the mega-verbose Composite Symbolization dialog a bit more accessible.

Component Symbol Definitions of a Composite Symbolization now also have previews so you can see how the component Symbol Definitions are assembled to the final preview.



Secondly, you can edit the XML of the Composite Symbolization if you know what you're doing and the existing UI is a bit too hard for you to navigate through.



Other improvements

MgCooker now provides you the ability to auto-calculate the meters-per-unit value required for tile generation via the official method.


Calculation uses the following methods based on availability:


Bad Feature Source, Feature Class and Geometry fields are flagged when you open a bad Layer Definition


The XML diff UI has been tweaked to combine the source/target views so you can scroll thorough both sides in sync.


A new context menu command is available that lets you diff 2 different resources of the same type using the refined Diff UI.


A new context menu command is available to let you get the spatial context information for a Layer Definition



A new context menu command is available to let you create image-based Symbol Definitions from a Symbol Library.


The resource picker has some extra navigation shortcuts


And if you're picking Symbol Definitions, you can now preview them inline



Finally, we leverage the new-found use of Watermarks to inject useful debugging information to most resource previews.



Download

4 comments:

that's life! said...

Way cool! It must be extremely satisfying to end a project on such an upbeat note! Way to go!

john_g said...

Thanks for all the fantastic work Jackie! Maestro and its underlying API are a pleasure to use. Your contributions are greatly appreciated. I'm hoping this doesn't also signal an end to your MapGuide involvement as a whole?! You would be sorely missed.

Jean-Marie Prévost said...

J'ai toujours aimé votre travail et votre contribution à map guide

Golden Homestay said...

hello...sorry for disturbing but i have question to ask..i am beginner in maestro..the layer work fine but the problem is how i can link the attribute with picture..i found some article that show picture using tooltip but i dont understand how to create the link..hope u will help me to solve the problem.tq