This Week’s Hangout: Whither Where 2.0?
The Hangouts continue this week and my very special guest is Sean Gorman. We’ll be talking about neogeography, GeoIQ, visualization, and what the DC Dev Center means for Esri customers moving forward. Clearly the GeoIQ team is already making an impact at Esri.
As always, we’ll go live at 10am PDT and leave comments/questions for Sean at any time. The comments will not be enabled on the YouTube page so make sure you comment on the WeoGeo website. I know you want to ask Sean what will happen with Geocommons!
Sean Gorman
Image credit: Esri marketing staff
Esri Goes to GitHub
Esri has actually shared open source projects before, but they’ve been strewn across many different services. It seems the GeoIQ for ArcGIS (is that a thing yet?) guys are getting this all organized.
We’ve got the ball rolling already with several repositories up and running on Github. Esri’s presence in Github centers around two separate accounts: http://github.com/esri and http://github.com/arcgis. The “esri” account will house (host?) code that is meant to be more freestanding and generic. Code that a has broad reach to very more non-GIS community like visualization examples, solutions and various other scripts will all live there. The “arcgis” account will house open source code related directly to the “ArcGIS Platform” and have repositories for things like ArcGIS Online templates and ArcGIS Desktop extensions. The structure of all the code and repos will grow and evolve as Esri places more code on Github
I’m not sure I totally get why there needs to be two (why not just use the Esri one?), but it sounds like this is a work in progress. I’d just assume follow the Esri one and wait for ArcGIS projects to filter in.
Jack’s a Little Slow
I’ll just hit F5 until the projects are all in one repository.
Hurricane Tracker 101
There is nothing like a natural disaster to get Geospatial geeks excited. According to twitter there is a storm blowing in. In the spirit of GeoComradery, I thought I’d list out a couple options to track.
- Classic GIS Map: PDF format for easy printing on that HP 4MV printer. (no Internet link because it’s sitting on your desktop)
- Classic Esri Website: The Esri Disaster Response Hurricane tracker is full of cloudy ArcGIS Online goodness. It is a clear attempt to put as much information in front of you so can’t read it. Others refer to this option as an autostereogram.
- The Stamen “Solution”: Stamen as always produces beautiful looking maps that are always taken at night. These are handy when you want to look at the map and not keep your significant other up from the light of your iPad. With the Esri map above, you’d have to build a pillow fort to keep the light on your side of the bed or couch.
- The official government website: If I woke from a 20 year coma and this was the first map I saw, it would be hard to convince me I had been asleep for more than 5 minutes.
- The hipster map: Rule #1, pick a projection that people aren’t used to seeing and make it beautiful enough so they don’t complain they can’t figure out where the Atlantic Ocean is.
- Google’s Map: Hmmm, guess not. Update: Here is the Google Crisis Map. The YouTube logos look classy!
- Update 2 - The Government Map With Good Data, but Bad UI: Nobody knows hurricanes better than NOAA and their map has lots of history and up to the minute data. Too bad it is in a flex viewer so I can’t view it on my iPhone or iPad while running for my life. That said, download button on the top is full of awesome.
This is the only Isaac I want to see at my door!
Hurricane Tracker 101
There is nothing like a natural disaster to get Geospatial geeks excited. According to twitter there is a storm blowing in. In the spirit of GeoComradery, I thought I’d list out a couple options to track.
- Classic GIS Map: PDF format for easy printing on that HP 4MV printer. (no Internet link because it’s sitting on your desktop)
- Classic Esri Website: The Esri Disaster Response Hurricane tracker is full of cloudy ArcGIS Online goodness. It is a clear attempt to put as much information in front of you so can’t read it. Others refer to this option as an autostereogram.
- The Stamen “Solution”: Stamen as always produces beautiful looking maps that are always taken at night. These are handy when you want to look at the map and not keep your significant other up from the light of your iPad. With the Esri map above, you’d have to build a pillow fort to keep the light on your side of the bed or couch.
- The official government website: If I woke from a 20 year coma and this was the first map I saw, it would be hard to convince me I had been asleep for more than 5 minutes.
- The hipster map: Rule #1, pick a projection that people aren’t used to seeing and make it beautiful enough so they don’t complain they can’t figure out where the Atlantic Ocean is.
- Google’s Map: Hmmm, guess not. Update: Here is the Google Crisis Map. The YouTube logos look classy!
- Update 2 - The Government Map With Good Data, but Bad UI: Nobody knows hurricanes better than NOAA and their map has lots of history and up to the minute data. Too bad it is in a flex viewer so I can’t view it on my iPhone or iPad while running for my life. That said, download button on the top is full of awesome.
This is the only Isaac I want to see at my door!
Mapnik 2.1 Released
Just in time for a fun filled weekend, Mapnik 2.1 has been release. There are a ton of great new features so there will be much to play with. As I mentioned during the hangout with Gretchen last week, I love the fine grained control of authoring maps using style files vs proprietary GUI wackiness. I honestly don’t see how if you truly care about cartography, you can continue to author maps using methods that are akin to using FrontPage to author HTML pages. It’s OK when you are making a webpage for your cat, but you can’t assume people will continue to pay you to click your mouse.
Jack Wall Ball
Well it’s either play with Mapnik or go crazy!
Mapnik 2.1 Released
Just in time for a fun filled weekend, Mapnik 2.1 has been release. There are a ton of great new features so there will be much to play with. As I mentioned during the hangout with Gretchen last week, I love the fine grained control of authoring maps using style files vs proprietary GUI wackiness. I honestly don’t see how if you truly care about cartography, you can continue to author maps using methods that are akin to using FrontPage to author HTML pages. It’s OK when you are making a webpage for your cat, but you can’t assume people will continue to pay you to click your mouse.
Jack Wall Ball
Well it’s either play with Mapnik or go crazy!