Tag: arcpad

Link – The Role of ArcPad

David Maguire responded to my post earlier about the purpose of ArcPad and I really can’t argue with any of his points. I guess it is more that I’m looking at this from a different angle than the ESRI ArcPad team is. As a developer I’d just rather have all this built into ArcGIS Engine rather than having to use a second framework (ArcPad Application Builder). If developers could use just one framework for all their GIS applications, that would simplify things so much.

From an end user standpoint there probably isn’t anything really wrong with ArcPad and embedded into Windows CE GPS units, it probably does a better job than previous proprietary programs did.

Link – ArcPad 7 Beta

David lets us know that ArcPad 7 beta is out and he’s got some details on his blog. Honestly I don’t really see the point of ArcPad anymore, this kind of stuff should be done on the server, rather than on PDA’s (and this is from someone that used to be an admin on a very large PDA site). I’m sure there is still demand from existing customers, but PDA’s are such a small market and their growth has slowed to the point that I don’t see anyone wanting to get into the marketplace. Smartphones are the future and the better choice for ESRI would be to migrate ArcPad support into ArcGIS Engine so anyone can develop applications for both PDA’s and Smartphones. ArcPad is on an island by itself and I don’t see ArcPad 7 changing that.

update – fixed a sentence to make more sense