Catching Up

I was out last week in New Orleans and of course had no time to block so I’m going to try and catch up this week.

I strongly agree with Dave Bouwman’s assumption that this is the result of a long lasting strategy of trying to cram desktop GIS into the browser with GIS manufacturers concentrating on developing utterly generic out-of-the-box’ WebGIS products. So this wants us GIS developers make to believe that we are able to produce WebGIS applications in a jif. But the simple fact is that 99% of so called WebGIS apps have a quite narrow purpose, thus need pretty focused functions and user interfaces instead of bloated generic UIs.”

It is clear GIS developers understand what hasn’t worked in the past and what needs to be done in the future. The trick is to enable complex GIS analysis in a way end users can take advantage of it. If it was easy, everyone would already be doing it.

  • More baseball geography; Five Migrations in Baseball History. Lets see, statistics, geography, beer, despair. Is there nothing baseball can’t teach us?

  • Yes, ArcGIS Server Flex API 1.0 was released last week. Cue the Where is Silverlight?” questions. Might be a great topic to discuss at the 2009 Developer Summit.

  • Google Earth for the iPhone has been released. After playing with it for a week a couple things come to the surface.

    1. First it is very well done and visually impressive. Fingers can navigate 3D globes.
    2. The Edge network is too slow.
    3. I almost got run over by a streetcar navigating the globe. Could that be worse than texting with your head down?
    4. The tilt function is confusing when you are walking. I want to hold the unit in front of my face, not look strait down (see #3).

I can’t wait to see the next version and start using the iPhone to interact with network KML.


Tags
Thoughts

Date
November 3, 2008