Link – New imagery available as VBR network links via Ogle Earth
VBR in Keyhole speak means ViewBasedRefresh network link which appears to be some kind of dynamic layer type. I couldn’t find too much about VBR on Keyhole’s site, does anyone have a better explanation?
Link – Hurricane Katrina Disaster Viewer
The Hurricane Katrina Disaster Viewer is designed to provide detailed information about impacted areas to responders, people affected, and the general public. The site lets you locate an address or zoom to areas of interest and view FEMA damaged areas, U.S. Postal Service affected delivery areas, post-disaster satellite imagery, population density, street maps, and much more information. You can also generate demographic reports.
Too bad this wasn’t released last week because it is pretty good. The Viewer displays many of the ArcWeb services that are available such as topo, flood, traffic and weather that aren’t available on Google Maps. I think many of us GIS folks will enjoy the application, but the general public has already discovered the “Katrina” button on Google Maps so getting them to switch over to this is probably impossible. All in all though a great demonstration of ArcWeb Services.
Grab my latest OPML files for both GIS bloggers and ESRI bloggers. If you use a RSS reader, you can just import these (the help file of your reader should tell you how) and have all the blogs that I read. Enjoy.
I updated the OPML files, hopefully they are valid this time
Link – ArcWeb and PHP Mini-HOWTO, Part 2
“In part 1 of this HOWTO we created a map and displayed it on a web page. In the section, we’ll add some points.”
Link – KML Home Companion 0.9
“This is an ArcMap extension designed to aid in creating KML format files for use in Google Earth. I tried to create the simplest program that would do the job, so there is not much in the way of error checking or fancy features. Please feel free to modify the code, report bugs, or to make suggestions for future releases.”
Link – Shape 2 KML
Shape 2 KML (Google Earth)
Version 1.0.1
Bug fixed encoding name and description”
I know ESRI is working on getting this stuff out of ArcScripts, but demo software continues to show up. I can only guess that this stuff gets automatically updated, rather than reviewed. Maybe there should be some kind of flag users can activate to let ESRI know about these commercial products that they are hosting for companies (think about how many downloads ESRI has handled for XTools Pro and how much they are saving on their own hosting).
Link – James help me snap out of the blogging coma
“When it comes to the ArcScripts site and removing demo products or other commercial goods – I couldn’t agree more; but I think that doing so is really only a Band-Aid at best. What we really need to do is ask ourselves; what do we really want in a collaborative code sharing environment? I’m sure that most of us have already used SourceForge, GotDotNet or perhaps the new O’Reilly CodeZoo. All of these have great facilities for establishing code sharing workspaces, providing infrastructure relating to enhancements, bugs and also rating and collaborative discussion.”
Boy this is really nice to hear. Most of us have problems with the current layout of the ESRI support website and having them move off of a proprietary CMS to something like SourceForge or GotDotNet would be wonderful. There are many “scripts” loaded into the ArcScripts repository that have source code attached to them but almost no way to collaborate on development of them. A move to something like this and away from the traditional layout would do wonders to foster grassroots development of ArcGIS add ons (both for Desktop and Server). Personally I kind of like the GotDotNet option, but one of my programmers prefers CodeZoo (which I will say is growing on me). To just think that something like Walt’s PHP ArcWeb code could have a place where we could collaborate on it or Andrea’s demos could spark interest in Public ArcWeb. Even projects like TerraServer Image Download could be enhanced with this kind of collaboration.
Everyone should let Brian know what you think about this and what features you’d want to see.
Link – ArcScripts Uploaded During the Last Week
3 of the last 10 ArcScripts are commercial products with a limited demo period. The more you look at this, the more you see how bad ArcScripts has become.
To be honest, ESRI ArcGIS users have paid quite a bit of money and they have no good framework to share just about everything they create. Currently Desktop users can’t share any good MXT templates they have created (or download any that others have created. Users can’t share any models created with the model builder. Users can’t share any Geodatabase schema’s or even UML. ArcScripts has some Python code and extensions/toolbars, but the search function is pretty bad and the interface is difficult to work with. ESRI should take this opportunity to fix the Desktop collaboration options available to ArcGIS users.
As bad as it is for Desktop users, ESRI is never going to break into the developer community until the start doing things that developers looks for in a product. ArcScripts has never been friendly to developers and most of us don’t bother releasing are code into it for various reasons. Brian is right on with thinking of a code sharing environment added to EDN. As of right now unless you need the software EDN is of no value to programmers who already have access to Server/IMS/Engine. If EDN had a place where we could share code and collaborate on projects you’d see a huge upsurge in ESRI development. I had a Google Maps API developer email asking where he could get questions answered for ArcWeb Services and I pointed him to the ESRI forums. He laughed and told me no thanks, he’d rather not get involved if that is the only way to work with others (beyond blogging). EDN showed many of us that ESRI was serious about developers, but since its release months ago we really haven’t seen much. Too bad for us.
Link – TerraServer Download for ArcGIS 9.0 (Version2) via ArcScripts
I was just thinking as I was using this extension that finding extensions, scripts, and other software created by ESRI is very difficult. Much of this gets lost in the ArcScripts and overlooked by many GIS users. Thomas Emge’s TerraServer Download toolbar is excellent and includes the source code if you want to use it for your own projects. I’m sure there is a ton of similar projects that exist both on ArcScripts and on many workstations at ESRI. It would be nice if there was a place ESRI developers could upload these projects in a sandbox were users could play with them (with the understanding that anything in the toolbox isn’t supported by ESRI). Anything from ArcGIS Desktop to the server and development products could be there for users to look and and implement in their own workflows and projects.
Link – ArcWeb Mini-HOWTO
“Creating mapping applications for the Web with ArcWeb Public Services can be daunting at first, so here are some helpers to get you started. Part of the code used here comes from Andrea Rosso’s fine example.”
Kudos for Walt for posting a writeup on how to create a ArcWeb project via PHP.