We've had several inquiries about looking at data related to the Haiti earthquake in Depiction. Our video showed how easy it is to get basic earthquake data into Depiction--and you can now view a related depiction online--but what most people are concerned about at the moment is the recovery situation.

The earthquake in Haiti is a devastating natural disaster, calling out for an international response. You can help by giving to the Red Cross here. It's also an important geological event, with key geographic information, and of a sort that Depiction can map very, very rapidly, especially with the Preparedness Add-on and data from the USGS. You can see how in our new video:

I have had a few questions lately about the quality of our imagery and maps. There is some confusion on how Depiction handles maps and imagery, actually. When you select a map or image source in the Quickstart Data list, you are getting a static image at the zoom level of your depiction area. If you're using 1.01.n, they will be put into Revealers and you will still be able to see the active map or image source you've selected for your background in the lower left corner of the Depiction screen.

Daniel, an intern here at Depiction, has started blogging about his projects using Depiction at a "Network Optimization on Depiction" blog he started. Daniel is is demonstrating how to do some very cool, very high-level analysis work using Depiction--determining, for example, the shortest route connecting a warehouse to each of its connection points.

In my recent post about mapping land parcels for the fire department, I mentioned I changed some existing icons, but I didn’t go into much detail about how I did it. I started by finding free icons on the Internet through a Google search. Next, my quandary was what format they need to be in and what size. 

As you might have seen on the site, Depiction's introductory discount ends in August--starting August 1, the price will be $199.00. The good news, of course, is that you can save 55% by purchasing Depiction right now. But why is the price going up? Mike explains in the news release we just put out this morning.

In talking with a customer recently, he commented, "I really like your background maps. They look very European." It turns out that though he now works for an insurance agency developing its business continuity plan, he was a cartography major.

My local volunteer fire department purchased a copy of Depiction asked me to help them with a project.  The fire chief had several things he wanted to do with the software but the first one was to create a map of all of the parcels in the district and then add to it the ownership information.  He had received two files from the local county GIS department: a shape file of all of the parcel boundaries and a database file of the ownership information from the assessor.

The challenge was to get the shape file data loaded and  then geo-code the address data.

Wired.com posted an article and interview with Vivek Kundra, USA's new CIO. The benefit of this for us, as Depiction staff and users, is the new website he has initiated: data.gov

It is the clearinghouse of US government data, from census tracts to Center for Disease Control data, much of which can be imported into Depiction. (For more on this, attend our weekly webinar, Depiction 102: Adding, Managing and Displaying Content)

In a conversation this morning with a customer about using Depiction for a Neighborhood Watch map, we came across a fairly good trick for viewing information in the app. He (the customer) was looking for a way to view the residents within a certain area: not just the elements representing them, but their name and addresses in a list. We (Kim & I) knew one could place the resident elements (People, in this case) in a revealer to group them visually, but how to make the list escaped us (it was an early morning meeting and I'd not yet had my coffee). Kim then remembered the Tag utility.