It's Wednesday, my dudes! Time for an FME weekly recap.

FME and Metadata

It's metadata week, I guess, because a blog article about the subject was just posted, and we have a webinar tomorrow (23rd September, 8:00 am Pacific).

FME is a great platform to use because it allows metadata control to be automated, like this:

Here an FME Server automation is used to keep metadata up to date and to keep end-users informed about the changes. FME is even more suitable because metadata is often XML-based, and you know that we all XML!

So go sign up for that webinar (or if you're too late, just watch the recording).

FME Academy Updates

Speaking of automation, I notice that there are a number of new modules on the FME academy on that topic.

Notice that you earn badges and points for taking the modules but - more importantly - you get to learn how to leverage FME in new and interesting ways. So once you've finished signing up for the metadata webinar, go sign up for these too!

Webinar from Brazil

Another event tomorrow (23rd) is Integração automática entre dados CAD e GIS, which I believe is a Portuguese language event hosted by our FME friends in Brazil.

It looks like it's about automatic data conversions between CAD and GIS, and you can sign up for it on the Solutial website.

Fireside Chats and FME Trading Cards

Our certified FME friends at Abley (in New Zealand) just posted a fantastic video discussing FME transformers.

Hamish, Todd, and Gavin talk about different transformers in FME, what they do, and how they might be improved. But which transformers did they pick? The transformers that appeared in the FME2020 Trading Cards.

If you weren't aware, we published a series of trading cards for FME transformers in FME 2020 and FME 2021:

You can buy packets online, but I just got approved for a community rewards budget (yay!) so I'll be handing these out on the FME Community to users who we feel have earned a reward for their contributions.

Keep an eye out for that, and a whole bunch of other updates to the community program, that we'll have a blog and webinar about in October.

New Features Web Pages

Did you know that you can look up older versions of FME - and what was new in them - by using a link like this: https://www.safe.com/fme/new-features/2018/

Just replace "2018" in the URL with the year you are interested in.

Why did this come to my mind now? It's because we made a decision to remove pages for 2016 or earlier. Those versions are outside of our support policy and - hopefully - no one is looking to upgrade to them anyway!

Playing with Shapez!

I thought I'd share this because it's so interesting. I discovered an online game called shapez (the shape part is enough to amuse a spatial data integrator) that is about building factories to combine shapes.

What's really interesting is that it sort of resembles an FME workspace. Above I am "reading" circle geometries, slicing them (the scissors "transformer"), using a "Rotator" on them, and "writing" them to the central hub.

You can split or merge the flow of geometries, there are tunnels for hiding the conveyor connections, and there are more "transformers" for creating and applying colours (you have to "read" colour features and then apply them to geometries, which is like appearances in FME).

Anyway, I know users who regard using Workbench as similar to playing a game, so I thought some of you might be interested. Maybe we could even use this as an aid to teaching FME concepts to new users?!

But be aware... it is quite addictive! And by the time you get to level 14...

...you can start to build very complex factories indeed!

If you try it out, why not post a screenshot of your factory below for us all to enjoy?