Link – ESRI UC Report
GISUser.com has their ESRI UC Report from the first day. It is a pretty detailed writeup of the proceedings, but they missed a huge announcement much like everyone else. I’m wondering what can be done to get ArcWeb more visible to users. Do people not understand what it can do or does the average ESRI user not care about web-based GIS?
Well it has been one month since I decided to restart Spatially Adjusted back up. Over that time I’ve posted 118 times and had over 5,000 unique visitors. Thanks for sticking around and reading and if I don’t have you in my GIS blogroll on the left, leave me a comment here and I’ll add you.
Link – ArcWeb services sign-up is now available
Brian announced that you can now sign up for free Public ArcWeb Services. Given how popular the Google Maps API has been I hope these programmer will take a look at the ESRI ArcWeb API and give it a try. I think ESRI needs to set up a section (forums maybe) for these Public ArcWeb Services and link to it from this sign up page. You can learn more at the Public ArcWeb Services FAQ page.
Since we’ll go into ArcGIS more later today I’ll focus on two announcements that I think are huge for ESRI.
First the new ArcExplorer. No its not really like the old one, but more like Google Earth (in fact at least the demo blew Google Earth away with functionality, but we’ll see how easy it is to use in the real world). The demo was pretty impressive because unlike the one stream that Google Earth uses for their application, it was able to pull from multiple servers for different datasets. It is free and no announcement was made to its release (the application on screen said ArcExplorer Prototype).
Second was the new individual ArcWeb Services package. This will be free for individuals and programmers. Jack announced that there would be a “robust API”, but I was very disappointed to hear no clapping at his announcement. I’m not sure if anyone got what Jack was saying, but you’ll be able to create your own ArcWeb Services applications. I hate it when something as big as that announcement doesn’t get a rise out of the audience, but I guess we’ll just have to evangelize it ourselves. The first thing I’m going to do tomorrow is seek out some ArcWeb Services team members and better understand how this will work and when it will be available. I’ve played around with ArcWeb with our EDN subscription, but now I’ll be able to play with it at home.
The new ArcWeb Services update looks great. It is all vector based using what looks like Flash inside the browser. The user interface is very “Google like” in its simplicity. In the past most ArcIMS and ArcWeb sites were overly complex, but now it appears that they will be as easy to use as Google Maps. I love it!
Link – UC Plenary and the AEWeb Demo
Todays details: the Web Application Site builder (aka Designer ) is a .NET winforms based application (not COM). It is a site builder tool for creating ArcExplorer Style web applications for your own sites. The output can then be reloaded in the builder for some customizations or opened in Visual Studio.NET and work directly with the web controls and underlying OM. The ArcExplorer Web that was shown is an ASP.NET web application that sported some of the new web controls and user experience enhancements that the .NET Server team (one of my teams) have been working on and that I eluded too in my AJAX postings. Yes, the .NET Server team is setting the pace for the richer user experience and web client framework development work at ESRI.
Sweet! We do almost all our programming in .NET and VS.NET so anything to make that easier is welcome.
It is pretty amazing how much the ESRI User Conference has grown over the years. The stage is huge and I like how it has been rotated 90 degrees so everyone is much closer (think widescreen). I’m looking forward to listening to Jack this morning and see how he responds to the changes in the consumer GIS realm.
You can now edit cartography features in 9.2 just as you would with the datasets themselves. Many times the symbology of ArcGIS just doesn’t display correctly, but now you can edit how the symbology is displayed. It is kind of hard to describe this, but if you think about how a product such as Adobe Illustrator works with vector lines, you now have this and even more control over how lines and features look and store them in your Geodatabase. You no longer have to massage GIS datasets so they look good, but work with the symbology. The backend dataset stays the same. I hope ESRI will put up a demo online so you can see what this looks like. Override symbols right from the view, you don’t have to edit the properties anymore. Very impressive!
I just heard that ESRI is blogging the User Conference. Check them out.
http://esriuc.blogspot.com/
Jack talked about the four core ESRI software strategies; Desktop, Mobile, Geodatabase and Server. ArcGIS 9.2 was mentioned for a early 2006 release. Clint Brown was then featured in a small video explaining that the 9.2 release would be consumer driven, more usable, higher quality with more documentation. I can’t argue with that! At 9.2 we’ll see some COGO construction tools as well as better attribute editing. It looks like we’ll get some of those old Workstation tools that we all used to love. Continued support for OGC (we’ll have to see to what extent that will happen). Jack thinks that tools such as Data Interopability will allow better sharing of data on the GeoWeb. Being able to translate datasets back and forth will be key.
New advanced catrtographic toolsets will be announced. Storing cartographic representations in the Geodatabase will simplify displaying these datasets over and over again. ESRI seems to really be trying to get beyond having to export to products such as Adobe Illustrator. There will be some cartographic generalization features in 9.2 as well as “geographic sketching”. If you think about those typical “planning bubble maps” you’ll better understand how this will work.
The ESRI Image Server application was VERY impressive. I’m really interested to hear more about how it works. We have ton and tons of digital imagery from our work around the world, I’d love to load that all into one location and not have to find the imagery on our server or archived off on tape. Going to just one source for aerials would be superb and I think Image Server can do that. I wonder if this will be released before 9.2 or will we have to wait until next year.