Spatially Adjusted

Author: James

  • Using the Yahoo Geocoding API with PHP

    Link – GeoCool!

    Web 2.0 and the programmable web that I and others have been talking about for a while has mostly been vapourware so far. There are a few generic components that are useful, but it is somewhat limited what you can do with them. And yes, you may consider this a somewhat biased view, but I think Yahoo!’s new geocoding platform is a huge step in the right direction.

    Geocoding is the hook that could get the Yahoo! Maps API more popularity. Rasmus has a great tutorial written on how to create a map with Y!Map API and PHP. He even shows you how to use the Flash or AJAX front end. I’m amazed at how easy it is to use and Rasmus even has a demo showing all the earthquakes (what else would a California programmer do) that have occurred over the past 7 days.

    y!-php-geocode-example.png

  • ESRI Posts ArcGIS Visual Studio .NET Integration Framework on EDN

    Link – ArcGIS Visual Studio .NET Integration Framework

    This framework provides a number of commands, wizards and templates which are available through the Visual Studio .NET IDE to help you create solutions, projects and classes for ArcGIS customizations more efficiently.

    This is the type of integration that makes any Visual Studio user happy. Anything to simplify workflows gets a gold star from me. Everyone who was involved with this should be proud, I know Art and Brian worked hard to get it up, but I’m sure there are tons more who helped. I’m really looking forward toward the 9.2 release.

    Check out some screen shots below in VS.NET 2003.

    Wizard1

    New ArcGIS Project

     

    Wizard2

    Add references wizard

     

    License checking

    License checking wizard

     

    NET integrated help

    Integrated Help

  • Big Change for Planet Geospatial

    I’ve made a pretty big change over on Planet Geospatial, but not one I’ve been talking about (I still need to buckle down and get mxTidy installed to fix that). Rather than full text RSS feeds, Planet Geospatial now only shows excerpts from the feeds, irrespective if the site offers full text or no. Both RSS feeds also only offer excerpts, rather than full text.

    I did this for two reasons. First I think if you enjoy an article, you should “click through” and view the article, rather than just read it on the front page of Planet Geospatial. Nothing has changed, other than only the first 500 characters on each post is now displayed. The RSS Feeds also only offer the first 500 characters, but as with the website, you just have to click on the title to view the whole post. Second the page was getting way to long. Many of the posts were pages of code, which might be enjoyable to some programmers, but I think it got in the way of readability for the page.

    My to-do list still includes integrating mxTidy and I’ll try and get that done soon, but the page already looks much better than before.

  • ESRI Technical Support Problems

    I just got this email in response to my email asking where the promised response to my technical issue was:

    Our support department is currently experiencing a high call volume and this, in turn, is causing a delay in our response time. You can expect an analyst to contact you by phone or e-mail within the next three to five business days.

    We are working hard to reduce our queue wait time. We anticipate hiring 5-10 additional staff over the next 45 days to help alleviate this problem. Your business is important to us and we apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.

    We ask that you do not escalate the incident unless it becomes an emergency and the response time does not meet your needs. If you decide to escalate this incident, please respond providing the reason it has become an emergency.

    3-5 business days? Of course it might have been nice to have gotten that email when I first sent in my request. I guess I’ll just reinstall ArcInfo to see if that fixes the problem.

  • Geobloggers Creates New Mashup Using Y! Maps

    Link – Yahoo Maps… First Look

    I’ve always been quite impressed with the Geobloggers map built using the Google Maps API, but the new mashup using the Yahoo! Maps API really has some “WOW” built into it. I’ve been of the mind that there isn’t anything that Yahoo!, Microsoft or ESRI can do to get people to move off of the Google API, but my mind is changing.

    Geobloggers yahoo

  • ArcGIS Explorer and the uphill climb

    Link – Google Earth vs. ArcGIS Explorer

    Google Earth vs ArcGIS Explorer

    As tired as some are of all the ArcGIS Explorer noise they have been hearing, it isn’t even a dent into the amount of Google Earth posts. This just shows that ESRI doesn’t have a hill to climb, but a mountain. In fact beyond a few blogs in our little GIS circle, not a peep has shown up on more mainstream blogs and sites. Most of the non-stop spin we saw was just repeating of the same stories. Matt Waite saw it and called it the “GIS geek world echo chamber” and what a small echo chamber it is.

  • Planet Geospatial and Atom Feeds

    I’ve been having loads of trouble with Atom RSS feeds from Blogger on Planet Geospatial. I’m beginning to run out of ideas to fix them (though I’m going to try and fix it with mxTidy tonight or later this week). The feeds validate, but the HTML that is generated by the WYSIWYG editor in blogger is horrible, so when I display them they screw up the whole page. We’ll see what I can do to fix this, but the only other solution is to remove feeds that cause this. I’ve been able to replicate this using Blogger, but TypePad doesn’t seem to have this problem. The best thing bloggers can do is not use any WYSIWYG editors and just type it all into notepad.

  • New Blog SQL for Geographers

    Link – SQL for Geographers

    This blog is dedicated to the integration between GIS and enterprise level relational databases. I am a Geographer by trade with a strong interest in relational databases. I have been in the GIS field for 10+ years and the database field for 7. The amount of data waiting to be spatially enabled within enterprise databases is extraordinary. I hope to show in this blog working examples of database-GIS interaction. Many examples that I will show are implemented within Oracle 9.2 and ESRI’s SDE 8.3. Hopefully most of the SQL algorithms will transfer to your implementation.

    Jeremy over at Mapdex has let us know about a new blog he’s put together about GIS and relational databases. He’s already posted twice and if these entries are any indication it will be a real treat. Great job Jeremy!

  • Some are more excited about ArcGIS Explorer news than others

    Link – Obligatory ArcGIS Explorer Post

    Ae ae ae

  • What is the future of ArcPublisher now that ArcGIS Explorer is on the way?

    I’ll admit it, my company uses ArcPublisher quite a but internally and externally with clients. Internally we use ArcSDE to share data and externally we use ArcIMS (with ArcSDE) to share data. Its worked pretty well over the past 2 years, but at over 100 megabytes it is a beast to download. Now with ArcGIS Explorer (and its svelte 15 meg download) will there be export of ArcMap documents? Or will there be a save to ArcGIS Explorer right from ArcMap rendering Publisher dead? Basically I have no problem continuing to pay maintenance on Publisher if it allows me to share MXDs with just about anyone, but this whole ArcGIS Explorer support of many formats really raises some questions.

    • What KML export tools will there be in 9.2?
    • Can we expect a KML/KMZ choice under File > Export or will it be more of a conversion tool in ArcToolbox?

    So many questions to be answered and not much news from Redlands. We will continue our use of ArcPublisher and beta testing of Arc2Earth.