Comments on: A look at ArcGIS Explorer Build 600

By: Keith

Keith — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 02:45:06 +0000

James,

Your last sentence is partially correct. ESRI is not trying to compete with Google in the commercial visualization market with ArcGIS Explorer…especially considering the latter is free. However, I also don’t think anyone at ESRI expects ArcGIS Explorer to consistently “sell” an ArcGIS Server solution to an organization. Without going into long, drawn-out examples, AGS is a server-based solution that an organization either needs or doesn’t. ArcGIS Explorer is, however, a strong complementary tool for AGS that is quickly gathering more ability to provide value-added functionality to AGS solutions.

By: Simon

Simon — Sat, 05 Apr 2008 23:36:10 +0000

looks good 2 me.

By: Jason

Jason — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 23:45:07 +0000

Looks remarkably like Office 2007. One just hopes it delivers a little more functionality than a word processor.

By: bender

bender — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 20:37:28 +0000

this app is completely useless because ags gets confused with the layer order in its globe services. one layer per service is not valuable.

By: John Brosowsky

John Brosowsky — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 15:56:32 +0000

I think yes – if there was no such thing as google, ESRI would still today have a great 3D globe app that they would be continually evolving based on new technologies. Remember ESRI’s 3D analyst extension, as well as ArcGlobe came before Google Earth, and ArcExplorer was free before that right? Maybe the keyhole guys were influenced by all of that. Who can say, and who cares? But we can certainly say now that explorer is on a great path and ESRI is doing a really good job at it.

Look, sure there is no doubt that Google earth was sucessful in some compelling and new ways, that has made lots of people think.

But now today, I for one am most interested in an embeddable component, as well as a web component, so that I can develop my own very vertical domain specific apps with the now common “globe feel and experience” but with my own UI and tools.

I can’t do a custom VE app on a stand-alone computer that’s not connected to the web, and I can’t do a google earth app in a web browser. I also can’t drop a GE control onto a windows form and develop my own app . So I welcome those things from ESRI.

I am interested to think about how an embeddable explorer control positions against ArcGIS engine, and now an explorer web control will fit into ArcGIS Server. Since ESRI talked about it at the dev sumit, we are all free to speculate until we get more info from ESRI.

For that matter, I am also interested in ArcGIS Online + the javascript API – which can replace Google Maps, and VE for 2D mashups – but ESRI does not yet know pricing for “non-free” applications of this technology. From what they told us at the dev summit, its free for users inside your enterprise, but not free for apps open to the web – which would be the opposite of say VE. But that’s another topic to shake out, maybe someone knows more than me on that – I would like to hear it if they do.

By: James Fee

James Fee — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 15:52:28 +0000

Well they did have ArcGlobe. Who is to say they wouldn’t have made a 3D viewer for ArcGIS Server Globe Services? ArcGIS Explorer is about selling ArcGIS Server, not about competing with Google.

By: Ron

Ron — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 15:18:33 +0000

John, if it weren’t for Google can you honestly say that ESRI would have developed this at this time?

By: John Brosowsky

John Brosowsky — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 14:28:37 +0000

Thank you ESRI. The vision for ArcGIS Explorer is really a great one and its really becoming clear now how ESRI is putting a lot into this. It already does way more than google earth and VE. I for one am really interested in the upcoming explorer stuff talked about at the dev summit:

- explorer embeddable control for developers creating custom desktop apps (google earth does not have that, VE does not have that)

- web control to put 3D mapping in a web application (google maps / earth does not have that)

By: Ron

Ron — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 13:50:29 +0000

Thank you Google.

By: Tim Maddle

Tim Maddle — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 12:36:33 +0000

Looks great. I think Build 480 is supposed to bring performance improvements, which would definitely be welcome in my case.