Spatially Adjusted

Blog

  • GIS Users Can’t Get Enough Google Earth

    Link: G-town Love: Look Out ESRI (dead link).

    Environmental Systems Research Institute (ESRI) is the microsoft of GIS… their the top dawgs in GIS software and in turn everyone use’s their file formats and forms of analysis. Overall they have some good stuff. However, google just launched google earth. Now I’m sure google’s software isn’t as robust as ArcGIS and doesn’t really support a wide variety of data types. However, there are a ton of small businesses and people that could benefit from a “light-weight” GIS that is easy to use and requires little training.

    While I agree that ESRI should have a consumer product, I don’t think Google Earth is close to being that product. The amount of press that Google Maps has been getting in both the traditional media and the blogsphere has been huge, but in the end all you have is a product that is much more similar to TOPO! (think DRGs rather than satellite photos) than ESRI ArcGIS. If one looks at what has happened with Picasa since Google bought them, you’d see that Adobe hasn’t been hurt too much by their sales of Photoshop Elements. I think when the press dies down and users begin to see what Google Earth offers them, they’ll enjoy the eye candy and move on to the next great Google offering. The rest of us will be enjoying ArcGIS 9.2, or so we hope.

  • GIS Web Services

    Rolleyes

    Now that everyone is starting to use the Google Maps API to do tons of web mapping, don’t you think it is time for ESRI to offer their own web services?

    Come now people, how long have we been doing things like Google Weather Map with ArcWeb Services. I’m not saying Google Maps API isn’t cool, its just that most of this has been done before. Has ESRI lost out because they didn’t open up their API like Google has? I’m guessing it is in their best interest not to get involved with Google Maps, Yahoo! Maps or MapPoint. It is easy to get excited about the “script kiddies” and their interesting applications they are building, but I don’t think much of this will lead anywhere as they will tire of their web mapping applications and move on. Stability is what leads developers to ESRI and their products, not eye candy.

  • Great Resource Blog on ArcIMS

    If you use or program using ArcIMS, you’ll want to check out Jason’s posts over at the ROK ESRI Developers Blog. Jason’s post, In Defense of ArcIMS is particularly interesting as we (myself included) seem to harp on how difficult it is to work with or how we have to do some crazy programming to get some simple things to work. To be honest, as I move into Mapserver and other open source server projects, I’ve begun to get a better understanding of how intelligent ArcIMS is and how well it does run out of the box. Unlike many map server applications, ArcIMS can be deployed on almost every major server software package as well as different web servers. When we start getting AJAX implementations of ArcIMS, I’m sure most of the complaints will go away. I wonder if we’ll see anything at the ESRI User Conference this year.

  • More Python Goodness

    Link: OSGIS Hacks Workshop Materials

    Materials from our “Open Source Python GIS Hacks” workshop are now available for download.

    I’ve been meaning to post about this for a couple days but Howard Butler has posted materials from his and Sean Gillies workshop at the Open Source GIS Conference. There is a ton of good material in there so if you want to see how Python works in the “real world”, now is your chance.

  • Scripting in Python

    When I first learned that ArcGIS 8 Desktop wasn’t going to support either Avenue or AML, I was very unhappy. As anyone who had done analysis with ArcInfo can attest, I had quite a library of AML scripts to accomplish almost anything. With ArcGIS 8 Desktop, I couldn’t use any of them. The thought I guess was to use Visual Basic or C++, but writing scripts with either of those two languages was like using a sledgehammer to kill a fly, I just stayed with ArcInfo Workstation and the good old AML. Avenue wasn’t supported either (I guess the boat has sailed on Open Source Avenue huh?), but as long as I could still use AML, I was fine. Well fine until we started using Personal Geodatabases. I couldn’t do a thing with those and the number of coverages we were maintaining really dropped as most people have standardized on Shapefiles or the aforementioned Geodatabase.

    Well with ArcGIS 9, we finally have a real scripting language again and even one that has made me stop writing AML scripts. I’ve really gotten into scripting with Python and it really has saved me quite a bit of work over having to try and do the same tasks with AML and converting Shapefiles and Geodatabases with ArcCatalog. With Python support came some great Python supporters and many of them have written some good articles to get started. A great resource is an article written by Howard Butler for ArcUser (don’t forget to check out Howard’s blog also!). Beyond that, all you have to do is head down to your local Barnes and Noble to find just about any Python book to get you started. Unlike AML or Avenue, Python is really easy to get started with and the community support available is much greater than ESRI ever had with Avenue or AML or even those of us who used SML and PC/ARCINFO. 😉

  • Blogger Meet-up Planned for the ESRI UC

    Link: My Own Little World – Blogger meet-up for the UC.

    Steve and Brian (dead link) are trying to set up a meet-up at the ESRI User Conference later this month. If you are intersted, navigate over to Steve’s site and let him know what you think.

  • ESRI Posts “Top Ten Reasons Why You Should Use ArcGIS 9.1”

    Doesn’t that sound like a blog entry? ESRI gets so close to actually blogging it just hurts to think about it. Come on guys, blog this stuff!

    http://www.esri.com/software/arcgis/about/whats-new.html

  • Just try and make me start using ArcGIS!

    I ran into an interesting discussion today with some users at a client site today. It seems while the GIS manager would just love to migrate everyone to ArcGIS 9.1, he just can’t seem to get people to move off of ArcView 3.x. I did a little demo to show them how much easier it was to work with files as well as the model builder to help them perform data analysis, but it didn’t seem to sink in. I also explained how they were moving to Geodatabases and ArcSDE and how ArcView 3.x wouldn’t be able to interact with those formats. The response? Let the GIS manager convert them to shapefile for us. Lets just say that GIS manager wasn’t too thrilled about that response. Looks like I might have to do some Avenue programming for this client.

    ArcView 3.x is the program that just won’t die.

  • Email Shapefiles or Geodatabases? Nah, give me e00!

    I’ve grown to really dislike emailing datasets to people. Shapefiles have always been a pain as you either have to attach at least 3 files to an email or “zip” it up to ensure that the files are readable on the other end. The Geodatabase did better as it was one file containing one or more datasets, but alas these days emailing a Microsoft Access file is just about worthless as most email systems (and even Outlook to an extent) strip out anything with a *.mdb extension. Yea, one could always use FTP or some other web based system, but email is still the easiest and quickest way to send files.

    One format that was never difficult to send (though half the time people didn’t know what to do with it) was the ESRI Export Interchange file (what we mostly now call e00). This single ASCII file was almost always accepted with email systems and could store many different dataset types. Why is it we always take a couple steps back as we move forward. I just can’t stand having to change a Geodatabase extension to _.txt or something else just to get an email system to accept it, or remind people that the need to at least include the _.shx and *.dbf with that shapefile they sent. I’d love to see a new interchange format from ESRI, or just update the existing Export Interchange format to handle the newer data types the ESRI is supporting. In retrospect, using a Microsoft Access file format probably wasn’t the best idea for many reasons, but if we had an up to date interchange format, that wouldn’t matter at all.

  • ESRI ArcGIS and the License Manager

    Our company has grown much in GIS in the 3 years I’ve been here and in doing so we’ve eliminated every stand alone ArcGIS installation in favor of concurrent licenses. While this enables us to save money over all the stand alone ArcView and ArcEditor licenses we’d need, we’ve begun to run into the problem I’ve heard from many GIS road warriors, you can’t check a license out for work in the field.

    I’m actually writing this on an airplane on my way to visit a client to talk to them about improving their GIS system and I’ll do so without a copy of ArcGIS that will run. Sure, I know I can install a copy of stand alone ArcView/ArcEditor on my laptop, but that would not be cost effective for our small company. At past ESRI User Conferences I’ve heard ESRI explain that they can’t let ArcGIS check out licenses because the license manager (FLEXlm) isn’t a secure as they’d like. When I used to work for a very large A&E years ago, we could check out AutoCAD license out of FLEXlm without any issue. The GIS portion wasn’t a big issue because we all had ArcView 2.x/3.x on our laptops which didn’t use the license manager and I didn’t mind not having ArcInfo 6/7 as most of the time on the road I wasn’t doing complex analysis.

    While in the hotel room I can use our VPN network to connect to the license manager, but most of the time I’m off the network, unable to use the VPN. I’m going to try and raise this issue again with ESRI at the User Conference, but I don’t expect any movement on their part. GIS has become much more mobile since the days I used old Sun workstations and I think it is time for ESRI to start allowing us to check out ArcGIS licenses (including extensions) for use in the field. I’ve seen the demos on the User Conference stage with the Tablet PC being used by utility companies in the field, but why should we have to tie a stand alone license to every computer that leaves the office? If FLEXlm isn’t good enough to do this, then ESRI should move to another license manager as soon as possible.