Blog

Not a geospatial site per say, but an interesting community site from Microsoft. According to Bill Hilf, Port 25 “will be the place we not only blog, but also where we put analysis from our OSS labs and also where we discuss and show other parts of Microsoft that we think are just plain cool or interesting.” All the posts seem to be from Microsoft employees, but I understand others will be able to take part making it more than just a marketing site, but a community. Time will tell if that succeeds, but it does look like those blogging already are a very interesting lot.

Anyone trying to create a community site should take note of how Microsoft is doing this. As with all their new community sites (Channel 9, 10, Atlas) the site is pleasing to the eye, has much content on launch and is somehow compelling enough to return for more. Just creating a community and saying it is open for business won’t get people to stay. As I said above, you need something compelling and Microsoft sure has figured that out (at least for people who want to learn more about Microsoft).

I’ve been getting a couple of people saying I don’t blog about NASA World Wind. Well you are wrong, I did have one post back in July ‘05. cough

Anyway, since I did get an email from a WorldWind fan about this new VirtualEarth plug-in for World Wind I’ll go ahead and post it. Casey Chesnut has a great write up on how he created the plug-in and how he figured out to serve the tiles. And not only that I’m very impressed. Its fast, easy to use (well the install could work better, but its not hard at all) and allows average users to get more functionality out of World Wind.

I really do need to get back on the World Wind wagon so I’ve created a post category and I’ll try and post some more especially after checking out more plugins.

Dave Bouwman over at ArcDeveloper.net has announced new choices to the ArcDeveloper forums. The categories include; .NET 2.0 and ArcGIS 9.1, All Things Java, Software Development and Developer Jobs. If you are frustrated with the ESRI Support forums, why not give these a shot.

I’ve been playing around with Atlas the last week and having a blast. I still don’t have Visual Studio 2005 on my laptop because we only bought two licenses for this office so far so I’ve been using the free Visual Web Developer Express tool with pretty good results (it is no speed demon I’ll say that though). Anyway I had seen some press about this Atlas Virtual Earth map control in the blogs last week and finally gave it a shot today. I might need to find a .NET host because I can see really getting into these Atlas examples. Others are jumping on Atlas to use with ArcIMS too so there could be some interesting applications in the next few months.

It looks like Jeremy is getting some good help from the chicken signed by Scott Morehouse.

No word on the status of the other chicken and how it is doing.

Update – Word is that the .NET chicken is on strike.

I’m sure were all waiting for this. Take Google Maps and mix in Google Base and you get Google Real Estate. If you perform a search for “Real Estate” or “Homes For Sale” you get an option to search a zip code for any home for sale. Of course a quick gander at local homes for sale in the Phoenix area shows that Google Base has a long way to go before it can compete against Realtor.com.

Update – looks like you can do the same thing with a car search too. I’m guessing we are seeing the integration of Google Base into the normal Google search.

Brian Glass released the Perl code for his ArcWeb mapping project a couple weeks ago and I’ve been meaning to post about it. If you’ve been looking for an ArcWeb 2006 Perl example, you should probably download the code. I’m not a huge Perl fan myself, but this example is quite easy to get working.

The Google Maps API blog announced that the new GMap API version 2 is out today (beta). The GMap v2 has been out for testing, but it is now officially part of the Google Maps API website. There are many improvements including the impressive “Fewer memory leaks” bullet point. cough

Google now has removed the page limit terms to the API agreement and they are nice enough to now give you a 90 day notice if they ever introduce ads into the API. The upgrade to your code seems as easy as changing v1 to v2, but I’m sure some mashups will have “issues”.

spatiallyadjusted.com is hard enough to type without the word planet in front. So I’ve spent the money and got a better (shorter) url. Please feel free to use http://www.planetgs.com from now on.

All these great AJAX interfaces makes one forget about how many different ways we provided feedback to the users waiting for the map to load. One of more interesting ones I saw back in the MapObjects IMS days was the Running Dog loading screen. You just sat and watched this dog run back and forth until MapObjects IMS returned your map.

Boy have times changed since Web 0.2!