Some great new usability features of 9.2.
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!
Konquest Online posts about their thoughts on Google Earth (dead link):
“I think that GIS producers should be humbled by the work that has been done at
Google and Keyhole. It’s not perfect yet, but it was developped in about one
year, has a great interface and is free. I’ve only downloaded Google Earth, but
they also offer the software in two other flavours: Google Earth Plus (which features GPS integration, higher print resolution and more powerful annotation features) and Google Earth
Pro (with a ton of features and can be compared with commercial GIS) But the Pro version is still priced only 400 US$/year, compared to the 10 000+ $ needed to acquire ESRI’s ArcGIS.”
While I too am quite impressed at the ease of use that Google Earth brings to desktop GIS, lets not lose site of the fact that is is only a viewer of GIS. ArcGIS, while more expensive allows GIS analysis as well as viewing the same and more GIS datasets that Google Earth does. Also ArcView is “only” about $1,500 and the 3D Analyst extension is about “$2,500”, much less that the $10,000+ figure quoted above. To compare Google Earth with ArcGIS is about the same as comparing Word Pad with Microsoft Word. To even list all the functions that ArcView does beyond Google Earth would take pages on pages of this blog. Don’t lose sight of the purpose of Google Earth, nor what ArcGIS is about.
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. 😉
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.
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.
I’ve noticed an interesting trend during the last year with our clients. Many of them have decided that internally they don’t want web based ESRI ArcIMS or similar products. We’ve worked with them to create either stand alone ESRI MapObjects applications (hopefully we’ll upgrade them to ESRI ArcGIS Engine soon) or just using ESRI ArcPublisher and ESRI ArcReader. The MapObjects applications have been more geared at management who need access to the GIS information, but not the complexity. These applications usually answer “what if” scenarios that we used to program via the web. The clients who request them don’t have or don’t want to invest the money in server side (hardware and software) GIS. Most if not all of the ArcReader implementations we’ve done use ArcSDE to store the data (some even use ArcIMS services). These clients seem to want the added cartography options that can be created with ArcMap that we’ve never really been able to get programming AXL. Printing has also been an issue. While we’ve gotten pretty good with some of our layouts on the web, they just don’t look like the ArcMap products that their GIS teams are creating. With ArcPublisher they can have the exact map their GIS analysts are working on. I’ve just received an RFP from one client that wants to look into the new ArcGlobe features of ArcPublisher which should be perfect for displaying what they want.
I’ve always pushed web based GIS because you don’t need to install software to gain value from it. But it seems with today’s managed computer installs, rolling out ArcReader to all clients isn’t as difficult as it once was. I will say the one feature that ArcPublisher/Reader still doesn’t have is a better “pack and go”. I’d love to see a way to embed the GIS layers in the PMF so that you only need one file to send to people. PDF is a pretty good solution, but sometimes you just want to grab that ID tool and see exactly what the database behind a layer is hiding. Oh well, maybe ESRI ArcGIS 10?
We are still developing web based solutions for clients and are even currently working on an open source solution. I just think some people have been burned by overly complex websites in the past and don’t want the overhead of maintaining them or dealing with another department that might control the webservers.
Of course UPS shows up at 5pm on the Friday before a 3 day weekend. Somehow I was able to not stay late and install ArcINFO, ArcIMS and ArcSDE 9.1 to play with. I must be getting older and wiser as this doesn’t sound a thing like me.
I’ll have to wait until Tuesday to see what happens.