Naivasha data on QGIS Android

A friend of mine is a passionate ecologist current doing botanical research into the change of forest cover in Kenya historically. Interesting study for sure. And we are always talking about the latest geo stuff, including mobile. Through his blog he shared a link which I took with great interest, loading Quantum GIS on to an Android. Had to try this one out. After struggling a bit, I got it to work as you can see, in which I loaded some ITC Naivasha data around water management. You can read more below.

So how did I manage to do so? Well, first of all I had to download the apk file from the android-qgis-page. 

Once the installer is running it wants to install a bunch of things like Ministro and QT libraries which it needs to be able to run, I went ahead and agreed.

After succesfull installation, I fired it up and there it went!

I loaded some local shapefiles, then changed some of the colours of the layers, changed classification type and was able to query any of the layers.

This is a really interesting development. Not only can one have a full desktop gis application running on a smart phone, one can also use features such as the phone's gps location to show where in the various data layers one actually is. We will be experimenting with this app to fully test the available functions. 

On a Nexus One, the UI takes a lot of getting used to still, some of the windows appear to go out of bounds and cannot be resized it seems. 

The Naivasha sample data (water resource management authorities) is just the beginning of lots of data which we will be adding to Virtual Kenya from ITC. This data can also be previewed on the Virtual Kenya Map Viewer. Alternatively you can open if full screen through this link. I have also embedded this map directly below for demo purposes.

Kudos to them for working on this and achieving such great results already! The user experience isn't great yet but I am sure a lot more will come from this space, we are on top of it!

Happy mapping!