Spatially Adjusted

Category: Thoughts

  • ESRI Water

    Bottled at the source in Redlands, CA…

    30936701 60b8ef4f32 o

  • Reflections on the ESRI 2005 User Conference

    So now that I’ve been back for a couple days from the ESRI UC, what do I think about what I saw and heard?

    1. Developers are back. It had been quite some time since I really felt that ESRI was supporting developers of their software. Every couple years we get some cool new tools to play with, but they always seem to be put on the back burner to analysis. This year with EDN, developers really had a place to hang out and coupled with the Embedded, Mobile and Server Islands, most of the ESRI floorspace was devoted to developers. The first .NET Special Interest Group meeting was great because we got so many bright minds into one room (then they forgot to lock the door before I got in) and we got to talk one on one with some of the best developer minds at ESRI about what we’d like to see. I know Art wrote down quite a bit so we’ll have to see how quickly any of it can be implemented (If I had to chose only two I’d would like to see the “gotdotnet” type portal for ESRI developers and a ESRI Developer Summit).
    2. ArcWeb Services for the masses. The big stealth announcement was Public ArcWeb Services are now available. This should really start helping ESRI develop their GIS Services business, but I don’t think we’ll really see it take off until ArcWeb Services 2005 arrives. The demos I saw with the flash interface streaming vector files was very impressive. I’ve started playing with Public ArcWeb Services, but I’ve got no public ASP/JSP hosting site so most of this will probably just be internal or playing at work. REST support with AWS 2005 will change everything.
    3. Common Application Development Framework (ADF). Might not seem like much to some, but this should make development much easier because we’ll have one framework for all ESRI server products. Coupled with IDE integration with .NET and Java, developing applications should be much quicker and easier as we won’t have to get down in the weeds programming toolbars anymore and focus on the actual application. I’m going to be counting the days until I can get my hands on ArcGIS Server and ArcIMS 9.2 Betas.
    4. Cartography in ArcMap. In the past you could either have it one of two ways. A map in dynamic map in GIS or a cartographic map in Adobe Illustrator. The new cartographic representation in 9.2 will allow you to perform “Illustrator” enhancements right in ArcMap. The power of these cartographic representations really needs to be seen to appreciated.
    5. Workflows, workflows, workflows. Over and over again in almost every technical workshop and even on the ESRI Showcase floor we heard about workflows. This has always been a big deal for me as I’ve had to manage more and more people. ESRI has listened to users and what their workflows are and made changes to the software in 9.2 to make our lives easier. A simple example would be the cartography enhancements above. Being able to leave everything in Geodatabases should save much time and not require trips between ArcMap and Illustrator anymore.
    6. Changes to ArcSDE. I never had enough time to learn more about the specifics of the changes at 9.2 to SDE, but we will have more options rather than just the current enterprise SDE that we have at 9.1. I’m unsure of what this will mean to users, but a free SDE (I assume this is the new file Geodatabase?) should help people better understand Geodatabases and I suspect these will be adopted more readily than the Personal Geodatabase that is currently so limited.
    7. ArcExplorer is back. Both the web based ArcExplorer (built with DHTML) and the windows version looked great. All that wonderful AJAX that makes Google Maps so easy to use is now in ESRI’s web client. In fact the demos I saw blew anything that Google or MSN has with their maps. I hope the long lead time to 9.2 won’t allow the competition to catch up. Many thought this was a reaction to Google or MSN and I don’t think that was the case. While I’m sure ArcExplorer has been influenced by Google Maps and Earth, there is no way even ESRI could have gotten the program I saw running as well as it did. There might have been smoke and mirrors to make it run better than it did, but even though couldn’t hide a mock-up and what I saw wasn’t.
    8. Sun has set on the UC? I guess the days of Sun, Oracle, Informix and Bentley having huge booths are over. The big booths these days are for GPS and Satellite Imagery companies. IBM and HP were there in force and Dell was back again after a little absence.
    9. ESRI Image Server If you’ve ever had to deal with rasters in ArcSDE you’ll know why this announcement is so important. I have no clue about price, but I can’t imagine it costing too much as you can already do this for “free” with UMN Mapserver. RDBMS are great, but not for storing images and finally ESRI has a solution to handle them.
    10. The Usability Release ArcGIS 9.2 is going to be one of those great ESRI software releases. Rather than cram tons of new features into ArcGIS, they are focusing on usability and bug fixes. This should make 9.2 work really well for all users. Going off what I saw, you’ll want to make sure you maintenance is up to date so you’ll get the 9.2 upgrade. ArcGIS 9.2 is too good to miss out on. Until then look for that service pack in the fall for 9.1!

  • Idle Hands are the Work of the Devil

    Well I had absolutely nothing to do tonight. So what would any respectable blogger do? Watch his horrible San Francisco Giants lose a game? Watch the latest reality show on Fox? Catch up on all those recordings TiVo made while I was at the ESRI UC last week?

    Nope, I had been working on a better template (this one resizes to the width of the browser), but I hadn’t gotten it to look quite right. With all these other blogs changing their look I decided to revisit it and a change from dark blue to white for the background which made all the difference. I’ve tried to make the template more XHTML compliant, but I’ve still got a ton of work to do.

    Now back to that TiVo and all those Family Guy and The Simpson’s recordings to watch.

  • What Didn’t I hear at the ESRI 2005 User Conference

    Well I posted about things I liked, now what about two things I didn’t hear?

    1. PostgreSQL support in ArcSDE I was really hoping to hear this, but no one I talked to would admit it was going to happen. The cost of SDE is so high because you need to pay for an commercial enterprise RDBMS. PostgreSQL is perfect for ArcSDE, but I guess I’ll have to continue looking at working with PostGIS.

    2. Public ArcWeb Services It looks like the ArcWeb Services team got caught off guard with the announcement of Public (free) ArcWeb Services. They didn’t seem ready to answer questions, that I had other than to say they’ll look into it. As long as this is all figured out by AWS 2005 I’ll be happy, but it was a little disappointing to not learn more than I already knew.

    Both of these were of strong interest to me going into the conference and I’m sure I’m in the minority in thinking that they are important, but they did dampen my enthusiasm just a little.

  • Stefan Wonders if Microsoft will buy ESRI

    Link – Memo to Bill Gates

    I’d guess IBM would buy ESRI before Microsoft would. I just don’t see how ESRI fits into their business model, but IBM seems like a great fit. Seriously though there are tons of other smaller companies that would fit better into Microsoft’s plans that ESRI and ones that are public and can be bought much easier than ESRI. I don’t think ESRI is too worried about the “mass market” especially if the software is given away. There is just no incentive to give up their independence for market-share.

    Actually the more I write about this the crazier his post seems. Lets just leave it at “AIN’T GONNA HAPPEN”.

  • More ESRI Bloggers

    Tim Craig – GIS Stuff, A collection of Misc GIS related links, information and other GIS blogs.

    Just found Tim’s blog in my site referrer list and the number of ESRI bloggers in my RSS aggregator just keeps growing. I’ve seen another one in my site logs that hasn’t posted anything yet. I’ll sit on that one until they post something (they seem to be an ESRI Software Developer who is into CSharp, GotDotNet and .NET 247).

  • ArcWeb Services

    Andrea Rosso has posted some great info about data available in ArcWeb Services in the comments of a previous post. I wanted to pull those out so others can see what options are available with ArcWeb. His points are below:

    1. ArcWeb includes the GlobeXplorer Premium data sources which have a resolution of up to 6”. If you zoom into the San Diego area you get more detailed imagery than in Google Maps. They cost a little more than 1 credit but if they are only used when downloaded then the cost should be minimal. You’d be surprised what you’ll find using the GlobeXplorer Premium imagery outside of the US (especially in large Urban areas).
    2. The coverage map is a good idea and I’ll put it in as a suggestion for version 2005. The issue is visualizing it properly.
    3. We are releasing new datasets constantly so as soon as we have new imagery it’ll be quickly available.

    Letting users know more about what data is available would be a great new service. The ESRI ArcWeb Services pages aren’t laid out too well for those who just want to see what they are able to view. The chart on the GIS Web Services page is great, but how about putting all the layers in there rather than just general terms and be able to click on a hyperlink to see a snapshot of that data in use? That would be really helpful to those of us who are just beginning to understand the power of ArcWeb.

  • The Map Room Site Redesign

    Link – New Site Design

    I guess it is the weekend for new site design with GIS or Mapping blogs. The Map Room has a great new look that is actually making me think about changing my darker colors to white also. I’ve always felt a darker webpage looks richer, but white is so much easier to read. Jonathan Crowe has done a great job with his blog design.

  • Howard Butler Tries a Podcast

    Link – A Podcast

    Howard Butler of Hobu.biz fame has created a podcast about his thoughts about ESRI 2005 User Conference and UMN Mapserver RFC 1. I think you did a pretty good job Howard and hopefully you’ll continue with more of them (especially with such great music).

  • Gjermund Weisz Talks About SportSim and ArcWeb Services

    note – see post update below

    I had a great opportunity to sit down with Gjermund Weisz of Sportsim at the ESRI 2005 User Conference and talk to him about his product and how ESRI ArcWeb Services is working for him. Sportsim is a free product that users can upload their GPS tracks from their workouts and view them over maps and satellite imagery. They only charge for downloading maps out of their product and as of right now Gjermund said about 10% of their users take advantage of their product. One of the great concerns for Sportsim is the lack of high resolution satellite imagery for the world. With Google Map and Google Earth, users expect and want great satellite imagery under their GPS tracks. Right now Sportsim is limited to basically Landsat and when you view a race such as the ESRI 5k run/walk you really see how bad the imagery is.

    5krun

    The business model of Sportsim is really interesting, they give away the program allowing you to use it without any restrictions. They way the make money is by charging users to download maps. Of course as I said above people really want high detailed satellite imagery so without ArcWeb Services providing these satellite imagery people won’t pay Sportsim. Take a look below at the ArcWeb Services satellite image vs Google Maps.

    LandSat

    Current Sportsim Satellite Image (Landsat)

    DG

    Current DigitalGlobe Satellite Image (From Google Maps)

    You can totally see how people would gladly pay Sportsim for that kind of high quality imagery. For Sportsim to be profitable, they need to provide services that people want so unfortunately unless ArcWeb Services can provide imagery that Sportsim needs, they will have to go somewhere else. No one is currently providing this service (at least at a price a small company like Sportsim can afford) so there is a huge opportunity for ESRI and ArcWeb Services to totally shake up the market.

    Update – Andrea Rosso reminds us that ArcWeb does have high quality imagery, but not for areas such as Japan (or am I missing something). I used the ESRI 5k run just as an example (I could have used any event in Japan or Europe), but Sportsim does have very high quality coverage for San Diego. It is the worldwide stuff that has Gjermund worried. Andrea, beyond the descriptions on the ArcWeb website, is there a “coverage” map people can look at to see where different services are available?