Spatially Adjusted

Category: Thoughts

  • You should post more about ArcMap!

    I got an interesting email from a reader who wants me to post more about ArcMap (I assume more about ArcGIS Desktop rather than the server products).

    James, how come you don’t talk more about ArcMap? I’m no programmer so all this mapserver stuff is way over my head. How about posting some ArcMap templates or geoprocessing models that you find? Keep up the excellent work,
    Derek

    We’ll I’d love to, but there isn’t really that much info out there beyond what is posted on the ESRI Support Forums. I don’t know of any ESRI bloggers who are part of the Desktop team so I can’t really link to any of them either.

    Derek brings up an interesting idea about posting templates and models. The ESRI site doesn’t really have a section for people to upload their templates or share models (beyond the one’s that ESRI posts). I won’t go into my rant about the ArcScripts page, but why not add a section for templates and models? There are a ton of products in the ArcScripts that aren’t really scripts or programming code so you might want to look there for things, but a separate section for templates or models would be interesting. Jack Dangermond was up on the User Conference stage a couple years ago saying how we should share out models with each other, so how about a way to do so?

    I’ll keep my eye out Derek for some more ArcGIS desktop news, but beyond PR emails and RSS feeds there isn’t much out there.

  • Virtual Earth – Lessons Learned Posted

    Link – Virtual Earth is one week old – What we’ve learned

    We launched Virtual Earth Beta a week ago yesterday, and the response has been overwhelming to say the least. We’ve received a ton of feedback and suggestions from users via email, reviews, and blogs (Check out Jeremy Wright’s review, Austin Pauls’ comments, Search Engine Watch, or this fun thread at /. for a sampling) Work is well underway on the next release of Virtual Earth and your feedback is super important to insure it rocks. Here is a quick summary of the most asked about areas of this beta release:

    An interesting look at what the Virtual Earth team has learned over the past week with the launch of MSN Virtual Earth.

  • Bill Dollins Wonders About ArcGIS Engine Licensing

    Link – ArcGIS Engine Licensing

    I was in the same boat as Bill, a long time MapObjects programmer who was **very** comfortable with the MO deployment and licensing. We’ve just started migrating to Engine from MO 2.3 so we too are still learning about how exactly this all works. I spent some time down at the Embedded Island at the 2005 ESRI User Conference and I think I’m now on board with the licensing, but there should be a document outlining the changes for MO programmers moving to Engine. Bill has some ideas about the way developers buy deployment licenses that might help MO programmers, but I just don’t see them changing it from the current method.

    Essentially, ESRI needs to come up with a model that allows the developer to purchase runtime deployment licenses from ESRI and then be able to distribute them to his/her end users based on whatever cost-recovery model (if any) the developer chooses. I can envision an automated tool that interacts with the ESRI web site. Such a tool could facilitate the purchase of the right to generate a certain number of runtime deployment licenses. The tool could then decrement the number of licenses each time the developer actually generates a key. When the number reaches zero, the developer has to buy more licenses from ESRI.

  • ArcWeb Services Satellite Imagery Revisited

    A couple days ago I posted about how the satellite imagery in AWS was much worse than Google Maps. Andrea Rosso commented that AWS did have much better imagery than Google (though it costs more in credits). I decided to take a look myself using the credits we get from our ESRI Developer Network license to see how my little part of Tempe, AZ looks (I mentioned yesterday that Virtual Earth has really old imagery that doesn’t even show our building). Take a look at the GlobeXplorer Premium US example for my building at work (the grey roofed building in the middle of the image).

    aws_sat_image.jpg

    That is a great looking image right there. Compare it with the closest Google Map/Earth image below.

    google_sat_image.jpg

    You can make out my building (yea, I didn’t center it too well), but compared to the detail of the ArcWeb Services it falls short. If high quality satellite imagery is needed, there is no comparison between AWS and Google Maps. Of course this isn’t available for Public AWS, but it does show how you can get more value out of ArcWeb Services if you do choose to do so.

    Andrea did say that he though a “coverage map” would be a great idea for a service such as this so you can see if this very high quality imagery is available for your area so maybe we’ll see something for AWS 2005.

  • Rainy Days

    I hate rainy days, its been muggy and rainy since about 9pm last night. At least I have tons of email to keep me busy.

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  • Quick Guide to Getting Started with MSN Virtual Earth

    Link – Getting Started with the Virtual Earth Map Control – via Via Virtual Earth

    Eric shares a very bare-bones example of adding the Virtual Earth control to a web page leaving it to the reader who can hack away with Javascript and html to create a more fully-fledged implementation.

    Frankly, MSN Virtual Earth doesn’t interest me too much but if you are interested in getting started this little guide might just help.

    Is there a similar guide on ESRI’s site for Public AWS? I see the code samples, but how about the 10 second guide to getting a Public AWS map on your webpage?

    Update – Ray Carnes correctly points out in my comments that there is a quick start guide for AWS. Someone should link that right from this page. Thanks for the pointer Ray!

  • Now Steve’s Posting Code!

    Link – alright keyur, lets see what you can do

    How cool is this? Steve Citron-Pousty is also now posting code to help us programmers out.

    Prodded by Keyur’s excellent post, and Jame’s nice kudos for Keyur, I am going to start posting more code examples. Most of my examples will actually be showing ArcObjects since this is the part I am focusing on for the next couple of weeks. So here you go fresh from the press. I just ported this tip, so the next time samples get built and posted to the website this will be up on edn.

    Great, now we got two ESRI bloggers posting Java code. Guess I’ll have to break out the “hello world” Java app I wrote 10 years ago and get back into Java. As I said previously just little posts like this can make all the difference to developers. Sure EDN is nice, but I’m sure I’m like most programmers and just type my questions into Google search rather than fight the ESRI forums and support pages.

  • Live WMS Data Inside Google Earth

    Link – Adding WMS overlays to Google Earth

    Chris posts some code to take WMS server output and overlay it inside Google Earth.

    To give a bit of background on how the following code works, Google Earth has the ability to send the bounding box coordinates of your current view to a file, or webpage. Now, for those people whose light bulbs arent going off, this means it is quite easy to create a small bit of code to capture these bbox coordinates and transform them into a WMS request. The WMS output can then be overlaid quite accurately with GE’s sat imagery and tilted, zoomed to your hearts content.

  • Lame Attempt at Creating a Virtual Earth Map

    I’m stuck at home waiting for our new kitchen table to arrive so I figured why not create a Virtual Earth control on a web page. I created the simple page below.

    Check out my place of work in all its B&W satellite glory except the image is too old and it doesn’t show up even though the building has been around for almost 5 years

    I was going to do something in AWS but I didn’t realize that my web hosting company doesn’t allow JSP on the level of service I’m paying for (el cheap level). I might have to upgrade because I’d really like to give it a shot. An even bigger question is why does a .NET programmer not use a hosting company that has IIS?

  • Keyur Shah Posts Another Gem

    Link – Adding layers dynamically in the ArcGIS Java ADF

    Keyur’s latest blog post is the perfect example for ESRI bloggers to follow. You don’t have to worry about posting tidbits of the lasted secret ArcExplorer features, just post like you would on the forums. I won’t hold it against Keyur that he’s into Java (it must be a life choice), but he did a great job of explaining how to dynamically add layers with the Java ADF in ArcGIS Server. If there were more great posts like this from ESRI employees we’d never really have to visit the forums.

    Heck it doesn’t even need to be programming (though I wouldn’t complain if there was .NET code being released somewhere), you can post about ArcGIS Desktop also. I’ve never liked the layout of the Geoprocessing and Data Models sections because they are just so disorganized, but if there was a Geoprocessing Blog or a Data Model Blog, that would be so much easier for everyone. I think many at ESRI are worried that their blog posts will get them reprimanded, but if your post is good enough for the forums (which are open to the public), then it should be good enough for a blog post. Keyur doesn’t post much, but the quality is great and other ESRI employee’s who are blogging or want to blog should take a look because he’s nailing it.