Category: Thoughts

Brian Flood has finally (j/k Brian) released Arc2Earth Publisher. Many have been part of the beta and have seen the power of publishing ArcGIS maps online without using complicated or expensive servers.

Arc2Earth is a single program that comes in 4 different versions: Standard, Professional, Publisher and Enterprise. When you buy one of these versions, your serial number will unlock different functionality in Arc2Earth. Each higher version contains all the functionality of the previous version. For instance, if you have Publisher, it also includes everything that’s available in Standard and Professional. Please look at the feature grid here to see the differences between each version.

Brian’s also announced a new Arc2Earth blog and appears threatening to blog more about general GIS topics again.

The demo is here.

Interesting*

Use Google Earth Pro – A software solution for viewing GIS data

Hmm, for about half the cost of Google Earth Pro, you could have Manifold…

• Fortunately searching for Goo doesn’t not result in Google trying to pimp their Goo….

Ed, congratulations on the new job.

Private sector clients of ours can’t or won’t use Google Earth as a client to our products until the EULA is fixed, can you address this? If Google Earth is to be more than a tool to locate flying airplanes in satellite imagery, we’ll need to see this addressed very soon.

Thanks,

James (Concerned GIS Professional)

The Keynote Presentation by Mark Driver of Gartner Research about the strengths and weaknesses of the Java and .NET environments is now available for download. I missed most of the presentation so I can’t really say how valuable it was, but it appears it was well received by those who attended.

All Points Blog brings up a topic that I’ve touched on a couple times over the past year. If we are to perform an sort of analysis using these free online tools, we’ll need to know more about the metadata and sources (and accuracy). As Adena points out, people are beginning to see the need for it and are calling for GYM to start providing it.

Well I’m finally a homeowner again. My realtor got me the key this afternoon and the house is ours. The seller had a moment of insanity that I hope has passed and we both can more forward and be happy. I just want to say if I ever buy a house from any of you, I don’t want your old neckties. I’m always glad to give to back to you ASAP even if you did forget them and tried to break into my house to retrieve them.

As I’m sure many of you who subscribe to ESRI’s email announcement list saw, ESRI is planning to release ArcGIS 9.2 SP2 sometime near mid-april. For those who missed it, you can view the changes here. One thing to keep in mind is ESRI’s definintion of a Service Pack may be different then yours. These aren’t just bug fixes, but feature releases (especially ArcGIS Server). So you’ll want to start paying attention to these Service Pack announcements in the future (remember there is a planned SP3 due later this summer) so that you’ll not miss out on new features.

Is IBM the Next Major GIS Player?

…ESRI, though Mr. Dangermond shows no signs of retirement, could make an interesting acquisition given the long-standing ESRI-IBM partnership.

We haven’t had one of these in quite some time and a couple have emailed me asking if I could do another one.

Knock yourselves out guys.

The best time of the year is when baseball starts up again.

Opening Day 2007

Recommended reading: Baseball Hacks