Category: Thoughts

Adena’s got a post up right now with the news. MapGuide Open Source is the “new” name and as an ex MapGuide developer, I’m glad to see the name stick around because MapGuide is a great name for a mapping product. Now the focus can be on what the MapServer Foundation should be and what are its goals.

Andrea Rosso has posted an ArcWeb 2006 “mashup” on his blog. Nothing too crazy here, but it is a good example of how to update your existing v2 ArcWeb apps to work with the new ArcWeb 2006. I’ve got to get back to playing with ArcWeb 2006 as its been about a month since I’ve done anything with it. The ArcWeb Explorer still isn’t out, but hopefully it will be soon, but since the ArcGIS Explorer Beta has slipped, we might not be seeing ArcWeb Explorer anytime soon.

ESRI’s Instructional Series Podcasts (rss feed here) offers free, short audio recordings that focus on hot topics such as tips to improve your workflow, tricks for optimizing your geodatabase, and updates on new software features

What a great idea from ESRI and they are produced very professionally. The Performance Tips and Tricks: ArcSDE Client-Side Optimization podcast was less than 10 minutes long so it didn’t get into much detail, but I’m sure there will be some that are more involved. One suggestion I’d give is to put a comments link on the page so people can give quick feedback to podcasts they enjoyed or suggestions for improvement.
via Rise and Shout

The latest word on ESRI’s ArcGIS Explorer is that the public beta won’t be available until second quarter 2006, rather than the January/1st Quarter time frame that was stated before. I’m guessing there is much work to be still done on it. Oh well….

Even if you aren’t a member, you can see the thread titles by selecting “From Our User Forums” on the ESRI Support Homepage. I’m assuming this will get resolved soon so enjoy it while you can. Also there are some more 9.2 Beta documents posted up on the ESRI Beta site. Glad to see the ArcGIS Server section has some documentation and examples. I’m still looking out for the media, maybe sometime soon.

I’ve had my GIS Technician hat on this week and I’m actually enjoying it. Its been a while since I’ve been able to do some simple mapping and analysis. Heck I’m not even using a geodatabase, just a bunch of coverages in Old Hawaiian projection. It is easy to forget how advanced the coverage is compared to shapefiles or geodatabases. I’m not about to create an AML and use ArcPlot, but I’m glad to see that Arc command line is really like riding a bike, you just don’t really forget it all even after years of not typing commands (though I did have a hard time remembering how to log into INFO but thanks to ArcDoc I’m good).

Brian Flood posted a pretty large update on what is new with the latest beta version of Arc2Earth. I’ve been really pleased with the beta so far and I’m sure when A2E is released to the public, it will be very popular as a tool to get your data both into Google Earth and even ArcGIS Explorer.

After watching the Mapserver Foundation email list, I was starting to get dizzy because people kept talking in circles. Because of this merry-go-round, I actually stopped reading the email list because as it seemed like nothing was getting done. Well finally Autodesk/DM Solutions have stood up and scheduled a meeting in Chicago on February 6th (not here in Phoenix). The foundation seems stalled on just picking a name so if they can just get that figured out maybe everything else will fall into place. Good luck guys.

As usual, Adena gets to the bottom of Microsoft buying GeoTango. In her article, she talked to Stephen Lawler who is the Manager for Windows Live Local about what this acquisition means to Live Local. Once you fight though all the buzz words and marketing speak you begin to see what the future of Live Local might be and how Microsoft might use the technology in all their products. As one astute comments pointed out, how the blogosphere has missed such an important announcement as this is baffling. Nothing from Robert Scoble or Chandu Thota shows that even Microsoft has missed this. Kudos to Adena for getting the story!

I’m not quite sure why people get so excited seeing planes in aerial photography, but for those of you who can’t get enough, here are some views that were posted on the Virual Earth Weblog.