Fiona and Rasterio releases

Like everyone else, I'm making releases before FOSS4G. Fiona 1.2 has a bunch of bug fixes and new features (contributed largely by René Buffat) and Rasterio 0.12 has new CLI commands and options. I'll be talking about these packages and their design and use first thing Wednesday morning (September 10) at FOSS4G. I've also got some things to say about Python programming and geographic data that are not specific to Fiona and Rasterio.

The big deal, however, will be the release of Shapely 1.4 on September 9. This is the first version with major new features since the project made the jump to Python 3. There will be quite a lot of new stuff in 1.4 including better interaction with IPython Notebooks, vectorized functions, an R-tree, and lots of speedups. It's been a group effort largely motivated by development of visualization and analytic frameworks: Cartopy and GeoPandas. Joshua Arnott and Jacob Wasserman in particular have been putting a lot of time into making Shapely better and faster over the past couple of weeks. If you're a Shapely user, please do something nice for these two the next time you see them.