Emulating MapBox
Did you see this new Esri ArcGIS for Developers website go up? My initial comment: https://twitter.com/jamesmfee/status/306554072104853504 Yea, HTML5 is teh awesome, right? But you can’t but help to notice that it looks like someone else in the industry. Noted others:
Thank god MapBox patented cartoon maps in circles http://t.co/HGg7fqQyqs
— Tom MacWright (@tmcw) February 27, 2013
https://twitter.com/springmeyer/status/306817393131417600 I’d like to think there wasn’t malicious intent here, just that those who created it want to be like MapBox and Developement Seed. Still, when the 800lb (363kg) gorilla does things like this, you can’t but help call it a dick move. 
Not Cool
Emulating MapBox
Did you see this new Esri ArcGIS for Developers website go up? My initial comment: https://twitter.com/jamesmfee/status/306554072104853504 Yea, HTML5 is teh awesome, right? But you can’t but help to notice that it looks like someone else in the industry. Noted others:
Thank god MapBox patented cartoon maps in circles http://t.co/HGg7fqQyqs
— Tom MacWright (@tmcw) February 27, 2013
https://twitter.com/springmeyer/status/306817393131417600 I’d like to think there wasn’t malicious intent here, just that those who created it want to be like MapBox and Developement Seed. Still, when the 800lb (363kg) gorilla does things like this, you can’t but help call it a dick move. 
Not Cool
This Week’s Hangout with Brian Timoney
Don’t forget, Wednesday at 11am MST, Brian Timoney joins to talk about “map portals”, data sharing (homework) and whatever else we come up with. Brian’s a smart guy and always great to listen to. Check out his FOSS4G Keynote talk:
FOSS4G 2011 Brian Timoney from Peter Batty on Vimeo.
FOSS4G 2011 Brian Timoney from Peter Batty on Vimeo.
You can either tag tweets with the hashtag #hwjf or join the chat live.
This Week’s Hangout with Brian Timoney
Don’t forget, Wednesday at 11am MST, Brian Timoney joins to talk about “map portals”, data sharing (homework) and whatever else we come up with. Brian’s a smart guy and always great to listen to. Check out his FOSS4G Keynote talk:
FOSS4G 2011 Brian Timoney from Peter Batty on Vimeo.
FOSS4G 2011 Brian Timoney from Peter Batty on Vimeo.
You can either tag tweets with the hashtag #hwjf or join the chat live.
GIS as a Marketing Term
Am I the only one who thinks the term “GIS” has become less valuable because it is thrown around like “the cloud” and “web services”? Heck the first 3 Google search results go to a company, not Wikipedia. That’s some serious marketing SEO.
As I’m starting up my own consulting company, I’ve noticed that it’s hard not to just say you “do GIS” and not explain what it is. Soul searching on what you actually do is a great way to get started. Say tuned…
Marketing Dork
Cartoon by: Hugh MacLeod
Avoiding the Broken Extension Problem
I got this email from a reader a couple weeks ago:
We use several tools that are built as extensions inside ArcGIS as toolbars. Most of these tools are built by other federal agencies (USFS and USFWS). These agencies are hit with cutbacks and budget cuts just like every other government agency. This results in an inability to keep up the extensions with current versions of ArcGIS. Do you know of any type of design/programmatic solutions that could in theory be used to avoid the broken extension problem that I seemed to be plagued with everytime I upgrade my software?
Problem we’ve seen for years. How many friends to do you know still using 9.3.1 because of an extension issue. Now to be fair, this is a problem with many applications and operating systems. My Dad is using Mac OS X 10.6 because some scanning software he uses has never been updated. But here’s the big question from above:
In short is there a way programs can interact with ArcGIS without having to be rewritten everytime a new service pack or upgrade comes along?
Now the kicker for this user is that they are using extensions created by someone else. The trick is to get these under your control. Now you could open up Visual Studio and start coding, but I’d say your better bet is to recreate the geoprocessing using Python and open libraries. That way you’d be software agnostic (well at least besides Python) and not have to worry about what version of ArcGIS you are using. Then I’d leverage Arc.py to call these Python processing scripts and perform the analysis from within ArcGIS Desktop. The best part of this is you can then transport this processing cross platform to any applications you are using. Simply simple!
Nodding
Because the ending as it stands today is very sad:
We just upgraded to ArcGIS 10.1 and it broke all the extensions i use and no updates are available. Hind sight being 20/20 I should not have assumed these tools would work from 10 to 10.1.
Esri gives lots of free Python training classes and Python has no shortage of great documentation.