Spatially Adjusted

Author: James

  • ESRI Releases Detailed Hurricane Map Viewer

    Link – Hurricane Katrina Disaster Viewer

    The Hurricane Katrina Disaster Viewer is designed to provide detailed information about impacted areas to responders, people affected, and the general public. The site lets you locate an address or zoom to areas of interest and view FEMA damaged areas, U.S. Postal Service affected delivery areas, post-disaster satellite imagery, population density, street maps, and much more information. You can also generate demographic reports.

    Too bad this wasn’t released last week because it is pretty good. The Viewer displays many of the ArcWeb services that are available such as topo, flood, traffic and weather that aren’t available on Google Maps. I think many of us GIS folks will enjoy the application, but the general public has already discovered the “Katrina” button on Google Maps so getting them to switch over to this is probably impossible. All in all though a great demonstration of ArcWeb Services.

    Esri katrina viewer

  • Google Earth Increases Resolution of New Orleans Satellite Imagery

    Link – New imagery available as VBR network links via Ogle Earth

    VBR in Keyhole speak means ViewBasedRefresh network link which appears to be some kind of dynamic layer type. I couldn’t find too much about VBR on Keyhole’s site, does anyone have a better explanation?

  • Virtual Earth API Available for Commercial Use Free

    Link – Virtual Earth APIs available for commercial use (and they are FREE!)

    “Here is the good news folks: We are now offering the MSN Virtual Earth API for commercial applications free of charge to developers. This APIs include the JavaScript map control and local search service (exposed via the What/Where search boxes on Virtual Earth site today).”

    There are some limitations, but this is the first free web map API I’ve seen available. I can only assume Google will follow suit.

    Also of note, Microsoft will introduce MapPoint Web Service 4.0 at the Professional Developers Conference (PDC) next week. It will be interesting to see how this will affect Google and ESRI’s plans for web mapping.

  • Walt Posts Part 3 of his ArcWeb PHP Tutorial

    Link – ArcWeb and PHP Mini-HOWTO, Part 3

    “If you’ve been following along, you should now be able to display a map showing points that you defined and stored in a database. Now we’ll look at how to zoom the map using a small control on the web page.”

    This could be the first zoom example in PHP I’ve seen on the internet.

  • Walt Posts Part 4 of his ArcWeb PHP Tutorial

    Link – ArcWeb and PHP Mini-HOWTO, Part 4

    So far we have a map with points, and we can zoom in and out. The next step will be adding a pan function.

    Walt finishes up his tutorial on ArcWeb Services using PHP today with to pan. Hopefully everyone will let Walk know what they thought of the tutorial, I know I enjoyed it. Maybe if ESRI ever gets a SourceForge/GotDotNet type site up and running, Walt can contribute his code.

  • 3 of the last 10 uploaded ArcScripts are commercial products

    Link – ArcScripts Uploaded During the Last Week

    3 of the last 10 ArcScripts are commercial products with a limited demo period. The more you look at this, the more you see how bad ArcScripts has become.

    Arcscripts

    To be honest, ESRI ArcGIS users have paid quite a bit of money and they have no good framework to share just about everything they create. Currently Desktop users can’t share any good MXT templates they have created (or download any that others have created. Users can’t share any models created with the model builder. Users can’t share any Geodatabase schema’s or even UML. ArcScripts has some Python code and extensions/toolbars, but the search function is pretty bad and the interface is difficult to work with. ESRI should take this opportunity to fix the Desktop collaboration options available to ArcGIS users.

    As bad as it is for Desktop users, ESRI is never going to break into the developer community until the start doing things that developers looks for in a product. ArcScripts has never been friendly to developers and most of us don’t bother releasing are code into it for various reasons. Brian is right on with thinking of a code sharing environment added to EDN. As of right now unless you need the software EDN is of no value to programmers who already have access to Server/IMS/Engine. If EDN had a place where we could share code and collaborate on projects you’d see a huge upsurge in ESRI development. I had a Google Maps API developer email asking where he could get questions answered for ArcWeb Services and I pointed him to the ESRI forums. He laughed and told me no thanks, he’d rather not get involved if that is the only way to work with others (beyond blogging). EDN showed many of us that ESRI was serious about developers, but since its release months ago we really haven’t seen much. Too bad for us.

  • ESRI Looks to Revamp ArcScripts

    Link – James help me snap out of the blogging coma

    “When it comes to the ArcScripts site and removing demo products or other commercial goods – I couldn’t agree more; but I think that doing so is really only a Band-Aid at best. What we really need to do is ask ourselves; what do we really want in a collaborative code sharing environment? I’m sure that most of us have already used SourceForge, GotDotNet or perhaps the new O’Reilly CodeZoo. All of these have great facilities for establishing code sharing workspaces, providing infrastructure relating to enhancements, bugs and also rating and collaborative discussion.”

    Boy this is really nice to hear. Most of us have problems with the current layout of the ESRI support website and having them move off of a proprietary CMS to something like SourceForge or GotDotNet would be wonderful. There are many “scripts” loaded into the ArcScripts repository that have source code attached to them but almost no way to collaborate on development of them. A move to something like this and away from the traditional layout would do wonders to foster grassroots development of ArcGIS add ons (both for Desktop and Server). Personally I kind of like the GotDotNet option, but one of my programmers prefers CodeZoo (which I will say is growing on me). To just think that something like Walt’s PHP ArcWeb code could have a place where we could collaborate on it or Andrea’s demos could spark interest in Public ArcWeb. Even projects like TerraServer Image Download could be enhanced with this kind of collaboration.

    Everyone should let Brian know what you think about this and what features you’d want to see.

  • More demo software shows up in ArcScripts

    I know ESRI is working on getting this stuff out of ArcScripts, but demo software continues to show up. I can only guess that this stuff gets automatically updated, rather than reviewed. Maybe there should be some kind of flag users can activate to let ESRI know about these commercial products that they are hosting for companies (think about how many downloads ESRI has handled for XTools Pro and how much they are saving on their own hosting).

  • More GIS to KML tools showing up in ArcScripts

    Link – KML Home Companion 0.9

    “This is an ArcMap extension designed to aid in creating KML format files for use in Google Earth. I tried to create the simplest program that would do the job, so there is not much in the way of error checking or fancy features. Please feel free to modify the code, report bugs, or to make suggestions for future releases.”

    Link – Shape 2 KML

    Shape 2 KML (Google Earth)
    Version 1.0.1
    Bug fixed encoding name and description”

  • Walt Posts Part 2 of His ArcWeb Starter Article

    Link – ArcWeb and PHP Mini-HOWTO, Part 2

    “In part 1 of this HOWTO we created a map and displayed it on a web page. In the section, we’ll add some points.”