Did you see this new Esri ArcGIS for Developers website go up? My initial comment:

@jiriteach well it doesn’t require flash to be installed so that’s a huge win.

— James Fee (@cageyjames) February 26, 2013

Yea, HTML5 is teh awesome, right? But you can’t but help to notice that it looks like someone else in the industry. Noted others:

Thank god MapBox patented cartoon maps in circles developers.arcgis.com/en/

— Tom MacWright (@tmcw) February 27, 2013

shameless imitation by @esri (developers.arcgis.com/en) of @mapbox design: does this foretell how they will approach open source code?

— Dane Springmeyer (@springmeyer) February 27, 2013

I’d like to think there wasn’t malicious intent here, just that those who created it want to be like MapBox and Developement Seed. Still, when the 800lb (363kg) gorilla does things like this, you can’t but help call it a dick move.

Not Cool

The always effervescent Brian Timoney joined me to talk shop. The IRC log is available here.

Don’t forget, Wednesday at 11am MST, Brian Timoney joins to talk about “map portals”, data sharing (homework) and whatever else we come up with. Brian’s a smart guy and always great to listen to. Check out his FOSS4G Keynote talk:

FOSS4G 2011 Brian Timoney from Peter Batty on Vimeo.

You can either tag tweets with the hashtag #hwjf or join the chat live.

Am I the only one who thinks the term “GIS” has become less valuable because it is thrown around like “the cloud” and “web services”? Heck the first 3 Google search results go to a company, not Wikipedia. That’s some serious marketing SEO.

As I’m starting up my own consulting company, I’ve noticed that it’s hard not to just say you “do GIS” and not explain what it is. Soul searching on what you actually do is a great way to get started. Say tuned…

Cartoon by: Hugh MacLeod

I got this email from a reader a couple weeks ago:

We use several tools that are built as extensions inside ArcGIS as toolbars. Most of these tools are built by other federal agencies (USFS and USFWS). These agencies are hit with cutbacks and budget cuts just like every other government agency. This results in an inability to keep up the extensions with current versions of ArcGIS. Do you know of any type of design/programmatic solutions that could in theory be used to avoid the broken extension problem that I seemed to be plagued with everytime I upgrade my software?

Problem we’ve seen for years. How many friends to do you know still using 9.3.1 because of an extension issue. Now to be fair, this is a problem with many applications and operating systems. My Dad is using Mac OS X 10.6 because some scanning software he uses has never been updated. But here’s the big question from above:

In short is there a way programs can interact with ArcGIS without having to be rewritten everytime a new service pack or upgrade comes along?

Now the kicker for this user is that they are using extensions created by someone else. The trick is to get these under your control. Now you could open up Visual Studio and start coding, but I’d say your better bet is to recreate the geoprocessing using Python and open libraries. That way you’d be software agnostic (well at least besides Python) and not have to worry about what version of ArcGIS you are using. Then I’d leverage Arc.py to call these Python processing scripts and perform the analysis from within ArcGIS Desktop. The best part of this is you can then transport this processing cross platform to any applications you are using. Simply simple!

Because the ending as it stands today is very sad:

We just upgraded to ArcGIS 10.1 and it broke all the extensions i use and no updates are available. Hind sight being 20/20 I should not have assumed these tools would work from 10 to 10.1.

Esri gives lots of free Python training classes and Python has no shortage of great documentation.

We’ve got a special episode of Hangouts with James Fee this week. Andrew Turner of Esri joins me to talk about what it means when he says Esri is open. Read up on his blog post and be ready to follow along. We go live at 12pm MST right here.

You can either tag tweets with the hashtag #hwjf or join the chat live.

We’re live at 11am MST! As always we’ll be talking on IRC. Join #hwjf on chat.freenote.com or online. Better yet, use #hwjf hashtag with Twitter.

Don’t forget, this week Steve Citron-Pousty joins me to talk geospatial technology and how to use OpenShift with your geospatial applications. We go live this Wednesday at 11am MST so be ready. A couple people have mentioned they hate IRC with a passion and I’m a neckbeard for using it. Well if you’ve got comments, you can use hashtag #hwjf on twitter and I’ll monitor that as well. How’s that for open? (open as in skies, not open as in a door)

As always, the feed will be available right here on my blog.

We’re live at 11am MST!

As always we’ll be talking on IRC. Join #hwjf on chat.freenote.com or online.

If you’ve ever seen one of Steve Coast’s OSM presentations, you’ve seen that GPS trace example of London where the delivery people go all over the place and you see the road network. Cool stuff for sure and I know you’ve always thought that would make great art. We think no more because there is now a Kickstarter to make that happen. GPS Art Poster gives you a map of your hometown or favorite city build using GPS tracks.

We start with many thousands of GPS traces from people moving around your city. Then we cook them using open source software and bake them in to the posters you see. Each black line is a unique journey. When paths cross they tell a story; the pulse of a city.

Steve has the whole USA, UK, Germany, Netherlands and Denmark. Kickstarter pledges start at $5 for a jpg desktop wallpaper and go to $99 for a full custom print. Shipping is free in the USA and reasonable outside. They are printed on acid-free archival-grade paper and high quality ink.

I’ve just gone ahead and gone with the $59 level and will be choosing Phoenix. Should be awesome!

Today the National Park Service and MapBox announced the launch of Park Tiles. These are some absolutely beautiful tiles built with TileMill, hosted by MapBox and designed by the NPS. From the NPMap Blog:

Park Tiles is not meant to be a total replacement for any of the basemaps we currently use. It is, rather, meant to give us an alternative basemap we can use in custom projects where we’d like to see our National Parks highlighted. We’d also like to incorporate more detailed park information (such as campsites, visitor centers, trails, etc.) at larger scales that can serve both NPS employees and visitors.

Basically they want more control over their base layers than they do with basemaps from Bing, Esri and Google (probably even MapBox too). So they decided to use TileMill to author and MapBox to host these gorgeous maps. I encourage everyone to read that blog post by Mamata Akella because it goes into detail about the design, data and technology that make up these maps.

Long time Esri users may recognize Mamata because she was key in the development of the Esri world topographic map and the canvas maps. Well it seems she’s moved on to the NPS and is creating amazing maps using TileMill.

MapBox has some more information on the project including a really cool features available to MapBox users. I like how the map is layered so you can turn off parks, road shields and other features as you need to for your applications.

I can’t wait to see the detail get rendered for the whole country. You can view the maps online right now and if you click on the “Switch to Mt. Rainier” button, you’ll see the large scale prototype of Mt. Rainier National Park that uses all OSM data. Simply beautiful!

We go live at 11am MST. Video feed will be below…

As always we’ll be talking on IRC. Join #hwjf on chat.freenote.com or online.

We’ve got a great hangout this week, Matt Baker joins me to talk about using open source software for GIS, graphics, publishing and everything in between. What happens when you go all open source? Clearly you can not only do your job, but thrive. Matt will be screensharing so we’ll have some great examples.

Join us at 11am MST (10am PST) to learn more!

Matt’s also got some podcasts on using FOSS for geospatial. Part 1, Part 2

Last week I mentioned that GIS applications are so hard to use in workflows. It’s like an old Yakov Smirnoff joke:

In the real world, software works for you. In GIS, you work for the software!

It’s not to say you can’t get value out of traditional GIS packages, just that you’re locked into doing things their way. I was just about to write a clever analogy but I think I’ll keep this simple. When in your GIS package, you generally are limited to only their processing tools. While this does allow you to gain familiarity with their use, you end up making compromises to get things done. You can buy your groceries at the gas station convenience store, but you have to work hard to make it all happen (wait, did I just use analogy anyway?). It’s at the supermarket where you can choose from 20 different kinds of marinara sauce to get exactly the right one.

I really think GIS is like a supermarket. When you do your projects outside of these proprietary GIS applications, it gives you the freedom to pick and choose which analytical libraries you want to get each analysis done. I can use GDAL, Arc.py, sci.py, R and even some Erdas to get my work done. Just how I’d make dinner, pulling different ingredients from different companies. Just like some nice ziti, you end up with great output and something that works wonderful with your work flows.

My feelings are GIS software should adapt to how I work, not the other way around. You should too…

We go live at 10am MST.

We’ll be talking on the IRC channel again so either use the IRC Web Client or better yet, point your IRC client to #hwjf on chat.freenode.net.