Hello #FMECommunity!
Here is the news about FME for the week ending 22nd October.
Community Activities: Random Acts of Transformation
So during our Community Webinar yesterday (depending on where you are and what your 'yesterday' is) Dale and I tried our hand at Random Acts of Transformation (RAOT) which is where we pick a transformer at random and try to explain it in as much detail as we can, with some lesser-known tips and tricks.
Fate dealt us an XML-based transformer as our first go, which was a bit rocky, but then we gave a good description of the FeatureMerger transformer and that was a lot better.
You can find just that section of the webinar on YouTube, where I hope to post more of these in the future.
Community Activities: Geoguessr
We're nearing the end of the Geoguessr subscription (about 7-10 days remaining) and many users are having fun with this:
We still have a few open spots if you want to play, so let me know.
Community Activities: Postcard Exchange
So while GeoGuessr was the October activity, the November one is a Postcard Exchange. Here's how it works:
- You register with the event and provide your contact details
- In mid-November we run a matching algorithm to match users
- You receive an email with the names and addresses of your matches
- You send a postcard (or any greeting card, really)
- You receive postcards from one or more different users
You can sign up for the card exchange on this webpage (yes, it's an FME Server app). You can choose to send/receive up to 3 cards and are welcome to enter your username and/or work address to increase your privacy.
So go sign up and make some new connections with FME community members from around the world. Because who doesn't like to receive mail?!
Community Website Update
As you can see from this update by one of our developers:
...the Safe community site now allows you to copy images and paste them into Q+A or similar messages. And it must work, because that's how I added the above image. So great news for those who found the current upload system a bit clunky.
Z Transformers
So I posted a question on Monday about what transformers we should create that begin with the letter Z - and the feedback was quite overwhelming! I think the commonest serious request was for a "zip" type transformer for compressing (or extracting) data files.
To some extent, that's not necessary because individual readers and writers will already do that. But file management transformers do seem to be gaining in popularity, and this would be a good match. So I've passed the request to our product managers and will let you know what I hear.
As for the less-serious ideas, I think my favourite is ZodiacSigner, which matches records with a date to their star-sign and gives them a horoscope!
There was also the Zapowifier (turns features into zap-pow graphics like in Batman comics), the ZipsterWatermarker (adds a Zipster watermark to all raster data), and a Zombie (Zombifier?) which replicates itself by turning other transformers in the workspace to Zombies too!
Webinars and Webinar Badges
On the webinar front, we have webinars next week on Revit and World Fair spatial presentations. Then we're into November when FME2021.2 will be released (with a webinar to match) and we switch focus to GIS-related topics such as coordinate systems, CAD-GIS, and coordinate systems.
But if you've attended a recent webinar, you may have noticed that we now give out virtual community badges for attending. Just get the code from the webinar and enter it online. Then show off your attendance record on the FME Community in style!
