Category: Thoughts

We all survived my son’s first trip to Disneyland. He had a great time and that made it all worth it. I’ll try and go through me emails and get back to everyone as soon as possible so please be patient. 🙂

ArcGIS 9.2 Beta 2 Phase 2 showed up today despite UPS’ best efforts. It didn’t come out in the photo, but the footprint is a nice touch.

I’ll be on vacation until May 13th. Make sure you check out Planet Geospatial while I’m gone.

OK, Adena Schutzberg has confirmation in my comments that ESRI will release a ArcGIS Explorer public beta in late June.

According to Directions Magazine Jack Dangermond says ArcGIS Explorer will be released in June. I posted a couple weeks ago that ESRI’s ArcGIS Explorer page changed the release date from Second Quarter to “Later this year” so either this is a new update to the release date or Jack hasn’t been updated to the new release plans. Either way maybe a new beta will be out soon as June isn’t too far away.

In the old days there was only a couple places one could get aerial imagery and it was pretty simple. You’d ask if they had coverage of an area and they tell you no and how much it would cost to get an airplane up in the air and fly it. These days there are thousands of resellers of imagery and one can almost get lost trying to figure out which is best.

At least I have what I want and it is going to work out well but maybe I miss the days of just calling a contact and getting the information. The Internet just makes this process too complicated for me because I already know what I want and the wizard based ordering is a hassle. Next time I’m calling rather than deal with an Internet server. Heck, where did all those wonderful Landiscor photo books run off too. I guess they are just too expensive to carry anymore, though I bet I could walk over to Arizona State and take a peak at some. 🙂

Update: Thanks to David Guidera over at Aerials Express for taking care of me.

So I was updating my Windows Messenger Live (aka MSN Messenger) and I got an interesting dialog:

Microsoft recommends that I close Windows Live Messenger Setup Wizard before continuing the install of Windows Live Messenger. Of course it never asked me to close Outlook which if anything I would think would need to be closed to get Messenger to install.

I was beginning to wonder if we’d be warming up or not this year. Of course early May is usually the time it first hits 100 degrees, but we’ve had a “cold spell” the last couple week so I was getting worried.

A couple people have asked me why I haven’t posted anything on the new “free” Google SketchUp. Well simply put I don’t consider it of any importance to the GIS community. First off I love working in 3D so don’t think this is me ignoring the possibilities. There are two big problems I see with Google SketchUp at least as this new “free” version is concerned. The program is only free for personal use so it is of no use for our company. We could buy the Pro version but spending money on something we don’t have time to use isn’t a good use of tight resources.

The Google Earth community is excited because they have a new toy to play with and maybe this will trickle down into the GIS community at large when more people start understanding 3D modeling, but from the standpoint of a GIS Professional this isn’t anything to get excited over. Having a 3D model of Taj Mahal is visually pleasing (eye candy), but it won’t help you perform your GIS analysis any quicker. Honestly the only way I’d get excited about Google was if they announced that they had 1 meter DEMs for the whole world available for free for download. Now that would help any GIS Pro get their job done quicker and easier.

There are some comments of my previous post about ArcView and Geoprocessing that would seem that people aren’t very happy with the limitations of ArcView. I’m wondering why people feel this way. I’m not surprised in the least bit that ArcEditor is required for the new cartographic features given that the geodatabase is now a requirement to use them. As ESRI begins to include more and more into the geodatabase I’m sure we’ll start seeing ArcView be left further behind.

I was actually unhappy to see ArcView be included in the “new” ArcGISIS suite at 8. ArcView was never meant to be a primary GIS tool back on the old ArcView GIS days. People were able to make it work because of Avenue and many (including me) sold our services to companies wanting more power out of ArcView to accomplish tasks that used to require workstation ArcInfo. When ESRI announced that ArcView was going to be a licensing level of ArcGIS I knew that they would have a tough road to ahead of them as people would always be wondering why ArcView didn’t support this or ArcView didn’t support that. Any program that has the work “View” in it shouldn’t be counted on to be the primary tool for any ESRI shop. With 9.2 and SDE now being available on workstations rather than just on the server, you’ll need at least ArcEditor to manage these geodatabases. We’ve all seen the presentations where ESRI has said the two most important things for Desktop GIS are the geodatabase and geoprocessing.

ArcView does has its purpose (though I wish they used a different name than ArcView) and if you primarily use shapefiles for your work flows, it will do a good job. Frankly I’m happy to see more emphasis on Editor and Info with 9.1 and 9.2 as we can start getting back to the old days of workstation type analysis rather than these GUI wizards that ArcView has introduced to community. I think the future of ArcView is more tied to the server and ArcGIS Explorer rather than the classic ArcView stand alone application and I think ESRI is looking at it this way also. Give away the client (ArcGIS Explorer) and let the Server (ArcGIS Server/SDE) handle the workload. Probably cheaper anyway than putting all those ArcView licenses on the desks of people who don’t need it.