Hello FME'ers
Welcome to What's Up Wednesday Thursday, our slightly late roundup of FME news for the week.
Recent Polls
I try to do a fun poll on Mondays and recently we had "How do you feel about the Parameter Editor window in Workbench", with this result:
Interesting to see how that window is used by a lot of users - but not everyone.
My poll for this week was, "which is the last transformer in your Recent Transformer list"?
As you can see, mine was the AttributeExposer. How about you?
Past, Current and Upcoming Events
Starting next week on Monday 6th December, we have the traditional 12 Days of FME competition. This year there are six puzzles spread out over 12 days. Most are just very simple quizzes. One might take a bit more effort.
The grand prize?! It's pretty spectacular this year. I'd enter to win it, except our lawyers said that I couldn't. You can find out more details on this page.
Currently underway is con terra's annual FME Advent Calendar. Under each door is a different FME technical or trivia question. Answer correctly to be entered into a prize draw.
I got today's question... wrong! Oops. Luckily you get to try again until you get the correct answer.
Also ongoing is the annual Advent of Code competition. That's where you solve a bunch of problems using whatever coding skills you have. There are a number of FME users taking part - using FME to do no-code solutions - with a league table too. You can find the puzzles on their website, and the ID number for the FME user league is revealed here.
Recently finished is the 30 Day Map Challenge. Congratulations to SRG for carrying out all 30 challenges using FME!
Safe Staff in the Spotlight
I have to congratulate my colleagues Dmitri and Sam for being recognized and highlighted for their work.
Dmitri features on the Eos Positioning Systems website under a customer spotlight - demonstrating the use of GNSS with FME and FME AR.
Sam, meanwhile, is nominated for ACE Voice of the Year, 2021. This is an award that recognizes people who have made a big impact in the field of customer education. If you've used the FME Academy, or taken training online with us recently, you might feel inspired enough to cast a vote in Sam's favour?!
Product News and Updates
As mentioned previously, the upcoming FME 2022 release will be 64-bit only. There will be no 32-bit version. In fact, even the betas online are now only available in 64-bit:
What that also means is the Python v2.7 will be fully deprecated at last. So if you have workspaces or transformers (including on the FME Hub) that have the compatibility parameter set to 2.7, you'll probably want to investigate and update them before upgrading to 2022.
For the current version of FME, we released 2021.2.0.1 recently (well, November 18th) and next week - it being the first week of the month - you'll likely see another "service pack" release. Unless I have my numbers mixed up, that should be 2021.2.1.
Recently we became aware that FME wasn't compatible with the new MacOS Monterey, and released an updated version for 2021.1 or newer. The good news is that there is now a fix for older FME versions too. As the above link explains, it involves downloading a file and copying it into the FME installation folder to patch it. It's pretty straightforward.
We've also noted that CityJSON v1.1 has been released:
Of course, we're all over that; though no guarantees from me when we might implement it. Contact our support experts if you have a pressing use case for this version.
Other User Engagements
What else has been going on? Well, Abley (NZ) has a new FME Fireside Chat video online, so give that a watch (I will, when I get a free moment!)
The Safe blog has a bunch of new articles including Managing Esri Jobs with Queue Control (that one's for you Bruce), Top XML and JSON Questions from the recent Ask-Me-Anything webinar, and the interesting Orientation and Geodetic Data from marketing expert Nicole and our top coordinate system expert Paul.
