What's Up Wednesday (29th May, 2024): Live events, FME Numbers Quiz, Shortcut Keys, A Creator Update, and more...

Hello FME friends,

Recently, someone suggested I release What's Up Wednesday in spoken/video form so people can listen while still working. That's not a bad idea and it would be fairly simple to do.

So... I created a recording of the 15th May edition and released it with three different voiceovers:

• Normal: Recorded with my normal spoken voice.
• AI: Recorded with an AI-generated version of my spoken voice.
• ASMR: Recorded with a whispered voice and a background of falling rain!

So let me know if a recorded version would be useful, and which voice you think is the best. The AI version is definitely the easiest for me.

I can't imagine that people really want ASMR recordings... unless you need something to make you sleepy! But it was fun to create.

And now, onto today's content...

Live Events

There have been a number of recent live FME events, and some more scheduled for the future. Here's a quick round-up.

Solutial (Past Event. Brasil)

Check out the Solutial website for lots and lots of photographs from the recent EU FME 2024 events in Brazil.

I'm so impressed by the large attendance and by what looks like great technical facilities. I think I read that the presentations will be on their website in the near future.

Congratulations on what was clearly two excellent events in Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro.

1Spatial (Past Events. Pacific Region)

1Spatial just wrapped up its tour of Australia and Singapore with one final event in Darwin.

Here's a montage of goings on in Brisbane:

Talks at the Brisbane event were:

• Leon Bowers (ACCIONA): "Get the Most from Your Esri Licensing with FME."
• Mike Gresham (AARC Environmental Solutions): "Beat the Bot."
• Alexandra Geer (NGIS): "Transforming Geospatial Project Delivery with FME."

Well done, folks. It looks like a great series of well-organized and interesting events (as always!)

Red Geographics (Past Event. Netherlands)

The Red Geographics FME event took place recently, and it sounds like a great day.

They had some great learning and networking activities - I might try and copy some of your ideas - so congratulations to Hans and Veerle for an event done very well.

Data Connections 2024 (Past Event. Spain)

con terra Espa?a recently held its Data Connections event in Madrid.

It looks like they had both presentations and workshops. I hope everyone had a great day.

FME Arena (Future Event. Norway)

Newly added to the calendar just this week. Get yourself to Norway in September for the Norkart FME Arena event.

Check the link for more information, including - if I have it correct - early bird and student pricing.

More Future Events:

• FME Inspiration Day (Belgium) hosted by GIM (June 4th: Wavre)
• FME Roadshow (New Zealand) hosted by Locus (Today: Christchurch, June: Wellington)

FME Numbers Quiz

I've been determined to add a few fun games and contests to the FME Community, and today I released the second of those: an FME Numbers Quiz.

There are five questions. The answer to each question is a number between 1 and 100. You score points depending on how far away your guess is from the correct answer. A lower score is better - a score of zero would be incredible.

Look out over the coming weeks for more fun, including the return of the multiple-choice FME Quiz that we all know and love.

Shortcut Keys in Workbench

I had to come up with some technical tips for a live "What's Up Wednesday" on today's Locus tour event, and what came to mind was the different shortcut keys available in Workbench.

Some of these keys are fairly obscure, and I don't use them much. Others, I use all the time. So here are some of my top shortcut keys:

• Ctrl+S: OK, you know this one already. But make sure you use it. In particular, use it as soon as you create a new workspace. That way, FME creates a recovery file to back up your workspace edits.
• F11 / Shift+F11: When you author a workspace, you want the maximum canvas space with no distractions. Pressing F11 or Shift+F11 hides all of the different windows leaving open only the Menubar (F11) or Toolbar (Shift+F11).
• Ctrl+K: Adds an annotation to whatever is selected at that point. This is probably the shortcut key I use the most - and so should you!
• F2: This simple key press lets you rename an object, such as a transformer, bookmark, or custom transformer port. It's definitely worth knowing about this shortcut.
• Ctrl+D: Duplicates an object, just like a Ctrl+C/Ctrl+V combination. Besides saving a click, Ctrl+D doesn't touch what was in your Ctrl+C memory, which can be useful at times.
• Ctrl+/: If you want to memorize one shortcut, make it this one. Why? Because it brings up the shortcut documentation! From there you can find out about all of the available shortcut keys (on both Windows and Mac).

A Creator Update

If you've used the 2024.1 beta, you'll have noticed a lot of updates that I'm not going to mention. But a tiny thing you may have missed is an update to the Creator:

As you can see, we moved the "coordinate list" options and added a GeoJSON option.

UPDATE: At first I said that we removed the coordinate list option, but actually, we didn't remove it. We just moved it to the Geometry Object where you pick the Coordinate Values tab:

So, coordinate lists are still there! Sorry for the confusion.

By the way, did you know that the Creation Instance parameter is optional? You don't have to create that attribute.

Community Resources

Processing Remote Data

Frédéric at Veremes has written a blog post about the best ways to process remote datasets.

In particular, do you download data and process it locally, have a remote database pre-process the data, or query data via a web service?

There are many ways to process data, but doing so efficiently requires some thought. I'm currently struggling with an API that lacks query capability. Should I just download everything and create my own local data store? That might be more efficient.

But first, I will read Frédéric's post because he has some great advice.

FME zum Kaffee

Here's con terra's latest video contribution to the FME community: a video about the Recorder and Player transformers.

FME Licensing Models

What are the different FME licensing models? How can you mix and match them to get your best solution? Jamie at Miso has the answers.

Miscellaneous News

• In order to try and remove bots and spam accounts, our signup process for FME accounts now has bot detection tools. Ideally, real people will never see or have to complete a captcha dialog, but if this becomes a pain point, please let us know.
• Check out the Community Events page for the latest list of webinars and partner events.
• Watch the Spatialworld Oy video on new features in FME.
• Here's a workspace presented at the recent con terra event. Looks like a very interesting project.

• Find out how to power enterprise dashboards with FME, with IMGS/DataBuilders