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OK, I watched the video and it is impressive. The navigation seems much better than I would have thought, though the examples he showed I can already do on my wife’s Acura TL GPS navigation (well all except the satellite photos). But that brings me to a big stumbling block that I can’t figure out how they will address it. How do you handle the satellite images outside of big cities or where the images are completely out of date?

When visiting my wife’s parents, I know Google Earth has the roads around their ranch (near Austin, TX), but the imagery is horrible. You can barely make out their house on it let along the large tank out front. I’d hope one could turn off the satellite image so it doesn’t distract from the road data. Also what will they do with areas of fast growth such as Phoenix or Las Vegas? A friend has been in his house for almost 3 years and their house still isn’t showing up on the imagery. Sure you could overlay the vector roads (which at least on my wife’s Acura are current), but that would be very confusing to many people.

Something as simple as the little “Map”/”Satellite” buttons on Google Maps probably would solve the problem, but I’m wondering if this Google Earth Navigation tool is still to much of a distraction for drivers rather than the systems designed for such a purpose. Can’t fault VW for hooking up with Google on this though.

I just wrote a small .NET application to display some database queries and I didn’t write one bit of code while doing it. I’m wondering how far we are from the “code behind” being hidden from the developer. Of course my little app didn’t do much so I was able to “avoid” having to jump into the back-end, but there seems to be a real movement toward developing applications using the WYSIWYG method rather than the old “notepad” method. ESRI demoed quite a bit of the .NET ADF where no code was written, but the results were as good as anything our little shop has created. It seems ever few years developers begin to wonder if they are working themselves out of a job, but I guess something new always comes along that requires us to dive into the code behind.

Of course I can always jump into Baseball Hacks and remember what using BBEdit (yea I do love BBEdit) is all about.

A friend of mine just said that rooms are filling up near the convention center so if you want to make sure you aren’t walking over 2 miles, you might want to get on the ball and reserve some rooms. Last year I stayed up in Solana Beach and took the Coaster right into Downtown San Diego. No worries about parking or anything. Pretty nice.

Looks like some ESRI developers aren’t sure where they fit within the new ESRI developer community.

…but those of us who are straight ArcObjects programmers for in-house applications didn’t have much choice. There were very few sessions geared to helping us RIGHT NOW, and I think that ESRI needs to understand that.

I’m sure not everyone has plans to migrate to .NET or Java in the next year so any new site should probably still cater to those who want to develop with VB, VBA or C++. At the very least there probably needs to be more migration examples and best practices to help those who want to move to .NET or Java. Like it or not, there are tons of VBA and VB6 applications being developed using ArcObjects and these folks can’t be ignored.

Declan Butler has updated his avian flu map and made some changes. First he’s changed the KML to a network link so you don’t have to download any new files to see the weekly updates, second he’s refined the datasets to help better understand the outbreak (Human cases, Outbreaks in poultry, Gridded poultry density of the world, Bird breeding and overwintering distributions) and third he’s gone ahead and is now using ESRI ArcGIS with Arc2Earth to generate the Google Earth KML. What a great example of using ArcGIS for analysis and Google Earth for distribution.

Update – Brian Flood has a great writeup on how simple it is to use Arc2Earth to make very professional Google Earth presentations of your GIS analysis. It is also a great look at how complete Arc2Earth is with its Google Earth integration.

An astute reader pointed out that the version of ArcWeb Explorer we saw demoed at the Dev Summit has made it into the wild. AWX2, as it is being called, has some pretty detailed imagery and a new navigation tool. (at least for me the “share” map link doesn’t seem to keep the satellite image on by default even though the word “hybrid” is in the url, must be a bug)

I didn’t think we’d be seeing it this soon, but it appears that ArcWeb Labs at least has a webpage. I tried to get into the SVG Viewer, but I’m getting a java error on access. At least this is something to add to your bookmarks or del.icio.us.

OK, you can now try out the ArcWEB SVG viewer yourself. At least for me, the performance is quite snappy using Internet Explorer and the SVG plug-in (that seems to have been installed by default probably thanks to some Adobe product on my laptop). Quite the busy day for the ArcWeb team, guess the Developer Summit got their juices flowing.

We’ve been struggling to figure out how to handle an AJAX application when one of its web services becomes unavailable. The problem at least for me was how to check with JavaScript to see if a web service is down. After hitting a roadblock with JavaScript, I found this post today on using Prototype to return a “network down” message if the web service is not available. Simple, clean and slick…

via Ajaxian

Want to see what the new MapGuide Open Source AJAX and DWF viewers look like? The Open Source Geospatial Foundation has a webpage with a couple examples for you to check out. Maybe Digg or Slashdot have linked to them because at least on my end they are pretty slow. I was talking about how ESRI could sell (or give away) the Web ADF so developers could use it in other applications, but maybe MapGuide Open Source could fit that bill also.