Category: Thoughts

It looks like Jeremy is getting some good help from the chicken signed by Scott Morehouse.

No word on the status of the other chicken and how it is doing.

Update – Word is that the .NET chicken is on strike.

I’ve been playing around with Atlas the last week and having a blast. I still don’t have Visual Studio 2005 on my laptop because we only bought two licenses for this office so far so I’ve been using the free Visual Web Developer Express tool with pretty good results (it is no speed demon I’ll say that though). Anyway I had seen some press about this Atlas Virtual Earth map control in the blogs last week and finally gave it a shot today. I might need to find a .NET host because I can see really getting into these Atlas examples. Others are jumping on Atlas to use with ArcIMS too so there could be some interesting applications in the next few months.

Dave Bouwman over at ArcDeveloper.net has announced new choices to the ArcDeveloper forums. The categories include; .NET 2.0 and ArcGIS 9.1, All Things Java, Software Development and Developer Jobs. If you are frustrated with the ESRI Support forums, why not give these a shot.

spatiallyadjusted.com is hard enough to type without the word planet in front. So I’ve spent the money and got a better (shorter) url. Please feel free to use http://www.planetgs.com from now on.

The Google Maps API blog announced that the new GMap API version 2 is out today (beta). The GMap v2 has been out for testing, but it is now officially part of the Google Maps API website. There are many improvements including the impressive “Fewer memory leaks” bullet point. cough

Google now has removed the page limit terms to the API agreement and they are nice enough to now give you a 90 day notice if they ever introduce ads into the API. The upgrade to your code seems as easy as changing v1 to v2, but I’m sure some mashups will have “issues”.

Brian Glass released the Perl code for his ArcWeb mapping project a couple weeks ago and I’ve been meaning to post about it. If you’ve been looking for an ArcWeb 2006 Perl example, you should probably download the code. I’m not a huge Perl fan myself, but this example is quite easy to get working.

All these great AJAX interfaces makes one forget about how many different ways we provided feedback to the users waiting for the map to load. One of more interesting ones I saw back in the MapObjects IMS days was the Running Dog loading screen. You just sat and watched this dog run back and forth until MapObjects IMS returned your map.

Boy have times changed since Web 0.2!

OK, I watched the video and it is impressive. The navigation seems much better than I would have thought, though the examples he showed I can already do on my wife’s Acura TL GPS navigation (well all except the satellite photos). But that brings me to a big stumbling block that I can’t figure out how they will address it. How do you handle the satellite images outside of big cities or where the images are completely out of date?

When visiting my wife’s parents, I know Google Earth has the roads around their ranch (near Austin, TX), but the imagery is horrible. You can barely make out their house on it let along the large tank out front. I’d hope one could turn off the satellite image so it doesn’t distract from the road data. Also what will they do with areas of fast growth such as Phoenix or Las Vegas? A friend has been in his house for almost 3 years and their house still isn’t showing up on the imagery. Sure you could overlay the vector roads (which at least on my wife’s Acura are current), but that would be very confusing to many people.

Something as simple as the little “Map”/”Satellite” buttons on Google Maps probably would solve the problem, but I’m wondering if this Google Earth Navigation tool is still to much of a distraction for drivers rather than the systems designed for such a purpose. Can’t fault VW for hooking up with Google on this though.

I just wrote a small .NET application to display some database queries and I didn’t write one bit of code while doing it. I’m wondering how far we are from the “code behind” being hidden from the developer. Of course my little app didn’t do much so I was able to “avoid” having to jump into the back-end, but there seems to be a real movement toward developing applications using the WYSIWYG method rather than the old “notepad” method. ESRI demoed quite a bit of the .NET ADF where no code was written, but the results were as good as anything our little shop has created. It seems ever few years developers begin to wonder if they are working themselves out of a job, but I guess something new always comes along that requires us to dive into the code behind.

Of course I can always jump into Baseball Hacks and remember what using BBEdit (yea I do love BBEdit) is all about.

Looks like some ESRI developers aren’t sure where they fit within the new ESRI developer community.

…but those of us who are straight ArcObjects programmers for in-house applications didn’t have much choice. There were very few sessions geared to helping us RIGHT NOW, and I think that ESRI needs to understand that.

I’m sure not everyone has plans to migrate to .NET or Java in the next year so any new site should probably still cater to those who want to develop with VB, VBA or C++. At the very least there probably needs to be more migration examples and best practices to help those who want to move to .NET or Java. Like it or not, there are tons of VBA and VB6 applications being developed using ArcObjects and these folks can’t be ignored.