I like that my hometown of Tempe, AZ is now included in the Virtual Earth 3D. My office looks great in 3D.
This is where the magic happens
If you rotate, you can even see Sun Devil Stadium (and home of the 23rd ranked Sun Devils) from my office.
Alas, my house is not modeled, but thanks for Google SketchUp, I’ve already take care of that. 🙂
Well I actually did have my SpaceNavigator in my laptop bag so I decided to download the beta driver and take it for a spin. So what do I think?
First off, ArcGlobe works exactly as you’d expect. If you’ve used the SpaceNavigator and Google Earth, you already have an idea how it works. You can customize the shortcuts to map tasks to the buttons to make repetitive tasks easier. In ArcScene, it works pretty much the same way, except you are rotating your scene rather than the globe.
In ArcMap, you don’t have a 3D view, but it works well for the 2D environment. The zoom/pan/rotate works well for navigating. The rotate function of the SpaceNavigator is a real time saver as you can rotate as easily as panning and zooming. I was very productive using the SpaceNavigator with my left hand and using my mouse with the right.
We’ll see how my opinion changes with time, but right now any ArcGIS user can improve their productivity whether or not they use 3D. My company had purchased the SpaceNavigator SE for SketchUp, but ArcGIS benefits much more and we’ll probably buy some more for the rest of our GIS Analysts (keep in mind that the $59 PE is only for education and personal use, you’ll need to spring $99 for the SE version if you want to use it for commercial use).
The SpaceNavigator will now stay attached to my workstation at all times
Well the day is finally here. ESRI and 3Dconnexion have announced support for the SpaceNavigator in ArcGIS. I don’t have my SpaceNavigator SE with me or I’d give it a shot right now. This is great news for ESRI ArcScene and ArcGlobe users who currently have to navigate the 3D environment with a 2D mouse.
I’ve been going through my inbox (physical, not email) this morning and caught something that made me laugh. I grabbed the latest issue of ESRI’s Federal GIS Connections and looked at the address.
We don’t need no stinkin’ departments!
Peter Batty has decided to start up a company called Spatial Networking that will:
be focused on location related applications in the social networking space
I’m quite interested to see what he has up his sleeve here.
Even toddlers are getting into the social networking space
Tyler Mitchell (Editor in Chief, OSGeo Journal) has announced in the OSGeo Discuss email list that the OSGeo Journal Volume 2 is now available for reading/download. I really enjoyed reading Volume 1 and while I don’t have time right now to read Volume 2, I see that there is an article on MapWindow which I’ve been trying to learn more about lately. I highly recommend that everyone interested in geospatial technology read the latest OSGeo Journal.
I’m sure most of you got the news yesterday that MapServer 5.0.0 has been released. I love the look that folks are getting with the AGG graphics library which just makes the rendered maps look very impressive. The change log is available here for those who want to see what has been fixed/added in this release. This could be a milestone release in web mapping, we’ll just have to see what happens.
Of course you don’t want to lose the announcement that MapGuide Open Source 1.2 was released late last week as well. You have two great options for open source map servers available for use, opening up great options for developers/users.
Open Source GIS, Kumbaya!
**UPDATE: **MS4W has been updated to include MapServer 5.0.0. Windows users might want to go ahead and give that a try.
The Free Geography Tools blog has been posting about saving out Google Earth imagery and georectifying them in your GIS applications. When pressed on the post by a couple users and bloggers (here, here), he’s posted up a clarification of “Fair Use”.
I still don’t believe one can use Google Earth imagery the way he is proposing and not be in violation of the EULA, but maybe I’m wrong. What do you guys think? Is this “fair use” of GE imagery or as some bloggers say, “stealing” Google’s product? As I said above, I’m of the opinion this is at best a very bad idea. Use NASA World Wind for this and you’ll be fine.
Gordon Gecko would use GE imagery in his GIS applications
We’ve all been speculating how this day would come. The EPA has licensed Virtual Earth for “mission critical” applications including customer applications on the internet as well as internal intranet applications. Many folks have been saying that it was only a matter of time before Google and Microsoft enter the domain of ESRI, Intergraph and Autodesk and it would appear on the surface this is a huge new shift for the GIS world. But underneath the news, we read that ESRI was critical to Microsoft getting this contract.
So what does this all mean. I think we are seeing that both public and private sector organizations want to give the best product to their customers (internal/external). That means using tools that folks are used to using. Virtual Earth and Google Maps/Earth are what these customers know how to use and are comfortable using them to get data and search for information. But on the back end, these organizations just don’t feel comfortable abandoning ESRI (or other geospatial companies) as they’ve got a huge relationship with them as well a their technical teams are used to using these “legacy” applications. The news of this relationship between Microsoft and the EPA, as well as ESRI’s tacit involvement might mean there could be huge new implementations of Virtual Earth in the near future. ESRI and Microsoft could be a great combination going forward in this Where 2.0 world.
Don’t forget thought that “ordinary” users don’t need Microsoft or ESRI to help them get their web based GIS applications on Virtual Earth. There are two good choices (here, here) to go, depending on what you want to get out of Virtual Earth.
Kevin Martin emailed me telling me that his great Export to KML has been updated:
WHAT’S NEW IN VERSION 2.4:
- implements KML version 2.2
- attributes from the GIS database stored in the output KML as “schema” items
- labels and information points can now be vertically offset</li;
- layer and features descriptions can be saved as and imported from files
- a horizontal ‘shift’ (in X/Y coordinates) can now be applied
- bunch of other bug fixes, minor tweaks and improvements
He also dropped a hint that he will be supporting raster data and even a basic KML importer in the near future.
Screenshots:
Export to KML dialog
Export to KML options dialog