Author: James

Yesterday I noticed that there were new blog posts in my Esri feeds from groups that I hadn’t subscribed to before.

What happened was that Esri combined all their “ArcGIS for” blogs into one massive “ArcGIS Blog”.

For the past few years the various ArcGIS product development teams have hosted a few dozen separate blogs covering the width of the ArcGIS system. Now we have pulled those together into a single ArcGIS Blog so that you can more easily browse, subscribe to, learn from, and stay up-to-speed on the latest information from all our engineers and developers. In addition, the single blog reflects ArcGIS as a system and allows us to better tell big picture implementation stories that we couldn’t in the fragmented system.

So now you’ll have to unsubscribe from your existing Esri feeds as many of them will stop working or give you topics you didn’t mean to subscribe to and do this:

While redirects are in place, we suggest that you update your feeds at your earliest convenience. This will eliminate the duplication of posts that you may be seeing in your RSS Readers if you subscribed to more than one of the team blogs. You can subscribe to the entire blog feed (http://blogs.esri.com/esri/arcgis/feed/) or you can subscribe only to those categories or tags that are of interest to you, http://blogs.esri.com/esri/arcgis/category/arcgis-online/feed/ or http://blogs.esri.com/esri/arcgis/tag/flex/feed/ for example.

I haven’t decided what to do with Esri and Planet Geospatial yet. I may just wait and see how verbose the ArcGIS Blog is before adding it back into Planet Geospatial.

Enjoy a little MapCafe with your Esri Blog Feeds

I’ve not had time (nor the will) to install the Windows 8 Consumer Preview yet, but those who have say the metro style works very well. Since the public at large finally has access to the Metro UI, it makes sense for Microsoft to release an SDK for Bing Maps.

Licensing has been changed to take advantage of Windows 8 Preview:

Along with the new controls, today we’re also announcing a new licensing model for the pre-release versions of Windows 8, providing you much more flexibility in developing and testing your Metro style apps on the Consumer Preview. The new Terms of Use for Pre-Release Windows 8 Metro style apps allows free and unlimited use of Bing Maps controls and APIs within your Metro style apps for the duration of the Windows 8 pre-release period. Additionally, you are encouraged to submit your apps to the Windows Store for others to use during the preview.

That should make developing much easier so you can jump right in. I suspect Esri will jump in on this Metro stuff quickly as well.

Now I’m not Nokia user, in fact I think I’m pretty sure I’ve never owned a Nokia phone. But since Nokia owns Navteq, I pay attention to them. When I saw this announcement on Nokia’s website about Ovi Share being discontinued, I figured I’d look closer. Since I don’t user Ovi Share, the graphic that Nokia had on their blog post caught my eye.

It appears Ovi Share uses Google Maps to display the picture locations. How crazy is that? Nokia doesn’t use Ovi Maps/Nokia Maps on their own products. Of course maybe it is because their users prefer Google.

I’m guessing with the Microsoft Phone integration, Nokia is going to leverage Microsoft’s tools (and probably Bing Maps) to share your “experiences” with others. Can we add Nokia to yet another company leaving Google Maps?

A couple of years ago, I remember people thinking (including me) that Google Earth might be that visualization tool that changes how people look at the physical environment. Google Earth does a great job with the effects of humans on the environment, but it just has never been extended to look at anything that can’t be draped over the surface of the Earth.

Microsoft came out with a project called WorldWide Telescope a couple of years back and if you are like me, you remember looking at it saying that it’s really cool, but then forgot it existed. Well, it looks like not only is WorldWide Telescope still around, but it is being used by the scientific community to help better understand the physical environment around us.

Layerscape is a new tool out of the Microsoft Research team that tries to address the needs of researchers looking at how the earth works.

Based on the popular WorldWide Telescope, also developed by Microsoft Research, Layerscape is a cloud-based instrument that enables earth scientists to analyze and visualize massive amounts of data. With Layerscape, scientists can create three-dimensional virtual tours of the Earth; explore new ways of looking at Earth and oceanic data; and build predictive models in areas such as climate change, health epidemics, and oceanic shifts.

The blog post goes into great detail about why Layerscape is needed and how specifically Lee Allison is leveraging these new tools to help Arizona manage their underground resources better. It leverages the visualization datasets of Bing maps, uses Microsoft Excel add-in for analysis, and an online community to share your work.

You probably are familiar with the earthquake jokes where those of us in Arizona will have beachfront property in a couple of years, but Allison shows that Arizona, like most of the USA, is an active fault area.

Clearly, this shows how WorldWide Telescope can be extended to help researchers visualize data quickly and easily and share it with the world. I really need to pay more attention to the Microsoft Research team.

HT: Ryan Taylor

The Big Map Blog points out that the Rozel Point SW DRG has few features showing on it. In fact it’s stuck in the middle of the Great Salt Lake.

http://topo.market.weogeo.com/datasets/topo-usgs-drg-topo-rozel-point-sw-ut/widget.html
USGS DRG Topo Rozel Point SW, UT

I’m sure there are tons of crazy TOPO QUADs out there but this one might take the prize. If you zoom into that dataset above on WeoGeo Market, you can see it’s just stuck in the middle of the lake.

http://topo.market.weogeo.com/widget?query=Rozel&lat=41.30173&lon=-112.71973&zoom=9&layers=BT
USGS DRG/Topo

The Big Map Blog has the QUAD as a JPG, but you can also download it on WeoGeo in whatever raster format works best for you including TIFF, ECW and ENVI.

HT: /r/gis/

Every week it seems another company abandons Google Maps and goes another direction. As my good friends at Google are quick to point out, these companies are either small or the total numbers just don’t register. Well how about this news from foursquare?

Starting today, we’re embracing the OpenStreetMap movement, so all the maps you see when you go to foursquare.com will look a tiny bit different (we think the new ones are really pretty). Other than slightly different colors and buttons, though, foursquare is still the same site you know and love.

Sounds like they did this on a dare, but were quite surprised to see how easy it was and the results were more than they had before. Oh and the stack? OpenStreetMap, Leaflet and MapBox. Right? Where have we seen that before? Oh right, just about everywhere in the past 6 months.

They are utilizing MapBox Streets which the team from Development Seed announced earlier this week.http://a.tiles.mapbox.com/v3/mapbox.mapbox-streets.html#14.00/33.421111/-111.931667
And it isn’t just foursquare using MapBox, but many others.

The’ve got a great webpage up explaining how to get started using MapBox Streets and Leaflet. You should check it out.

“Let my mappers go!”

While watching the Esri Federal GIS Conference last week, I tweeted this when Jack was talking about new features to the raster manipulation tools in ArcGIS 10.1.

Now if you were sitting there, you know you didn’t actually hear Jack say that. What he actually said was that you didn’t need external tools to manipulate rasters anymore. My Erdas joke aside, basically Esri is embedding tools into ArcGIS for Desktop that a year ago you’d pay another company for.

Now I don’t work with rasters anymore like I used to, but I can see the big picture here. Esri is filling in the spaces on their ArcGIS suite with tools that others used to provide. And even more interesting, they are including these tools essentially for free with your ArcGIS license. Maybe 10 years ago, you’d see an Extension for ArcGIS where raster tools could be licensed to those who might need them. Now they are being given away with the master ArcGIS package.

And it isn’t just raster, Lidar tools, 3D tools and other features users want are being backed right into the core ArcGIS package. This is a huge shift for Esri and one that I think Esri users will be very happy with. I still wake up in a cold sweat because I had a nightmare where all the Spatial Analyst tools were checked out and I had a deadline in 5 minutes. Now I’m not sure that we’ll see all these existing extensions being rolled into the core (some of it is probably licensing, see Data Interop), but you have to wonder what changes might be in store with 10.2 11 next year.

You can now flash some more cash around thanks to less software maintenance costs

The image manipulation tools in ArcGIS 10.1 look pretty sweet and given that we’ll have them available in the core ArcGIS package might make many Analysts jump for joy. I guess many can take that Erdas maintenance costs and buy something cool.

There is such focus on Google Maps, OpenStreetMap and projects like TileMill that you forget about the smaller elephant in the room (the one behind the Google elephant). It looks like Bing Maps and Nokia are getting “unified”.

Last year, we entered into a strategic partnership with Nokia which included plans to offer a unique and compelling mapping experience for our customers. Since then we’ve been working with Nokia and Windows Phone to deliver a unified map style based on one set of design principles with the goal of providing a more intuitive and pleasing online mapping experience. Our Bing Maps designers teamed closely with our partners at Nokia Maps and the Windows Phone team to unify our map elements, improve contrast and usability to ultimately create a more beautiful and functional map. Today we’re excited to share the new map design, available on desktop and mobile versions of Bing and Nokia maps.

I’ll be honest, I do like the new tiles as they are shown in Nokia Maps. There is just something about grey backgrounds that appeal to me.

Now maybe Bing is going to roll out these new tiles soon, but for now you’ll need to use Nokia Maps to see what they are looking at. Even on my iPhone, I’m still seeing the older Bing Maps tiles.

Last week at the Esri Federal GIS Conference I sat in a couple of sessions on Esri and hosted GIS (what they call “the Cloud”). I even blogged about one of the sessions which I though that Esri did a really good job explaining how hosted GIS works and what you need to know before you bet the farm on it. Buried in there I said this:

I’m happy to see a Linux AMI choice, but unfortunately the news is that I still can’t roll out 10.1 linux myself, I have to use Esri’s AMI.

I’ve said that a couple times before over the years but on the plane ride home from D.C. I started to think about why this was the case.

1. I’ve been using ArcGIS Server for so long, I feel like I need to have total control over it.
2. I think I can create an AMI better than the thousands of engineers at Esri.
3. I won’t be able to use the AMI how I want.
4. I’m getting old in my age and I don’t like change.

I want to be my own gatekeeper.

I think that about covers it. When it comes down to it, I’m just worried that ArcGIS Server on AWS using Esri’s AMI might be bloated and slow. I think deep down I could probably configure that thing in a way that would make it sing. But as I sat on the runway at JFK for an hour waiting to take off, I began to second guess myself. Let me turn those 4 points back on themselves.

1. Sure I’ve been using ArcGIS Server forever, but Esri’s AMI isn’t locked down. It’s a full featured ArcGIS Server (depending on how you license it).
2. While I’m darn good at what I do, something tells me that Esri probably knows how to scale ArcGIS in AWS. And seriously, scaling ArcGIS Server is a huge pain in the rear so why do I think I want to handle that myself?
3. I use AMIs all the time that I didn’t create myself.
4. I don’t want to get a neck beard so I better stop thinking like that.

So ArcGIS Server 10.1 will be on Ubuntu as an AMI and all I have to do is request Esri to release it to me. Let’s just ignore the licensing for a minute, that’s pretty sweet. I need an ArcGIS Server? Bam, there it is. But the sweetness only goes so far, I’m still stuck without an ELA so this utopia isn’t as wonderful as it seemed while our airplane was in line waiting to take off. Still, if Esri can ever figure out how the licensing works for users like me, there might be a great future here.

So this is where I embrace the new world order on using ArcGIS Server with AWS and just let Esri handle the details as to how ArcGIS Server should work. I can focus on what I really want to focus on, leveraging ArcGIS Server for my customers (again, assuming the licensing is ever resolved). Almost there…

Time to dig that Esri shirt back out and wear it proudly.

We should all be thankful that we in North America the USA have a FOSS4G conference every 6 months. Well as nice as that is, it means you better get your abstract in for your in the next few days (though we do get an extra day this year). A hat tip to Paul Ramsey for reminding us all to not forget and get your abstract submitted.