The new ArcGIS.com from ESRI is officially online as a public Beta version. We have successfully moved from a dark background to white, as can be seen on the right.
ArcGIS Online Beta Screenshot
Apr 08
The new ESRI Support website
The ESRI family of websites have been seeing a lot of new updates as of late. The screenshot on the right is of the support site that ESRI offers, which hadn’t changed in quite a while. Notice the changes, including the lack of links to the web help (which has proven so helpful in the past to show people help files), and no direct link to the forums prominent in the page (it is located on the left-hand side navigation bar). Instead, people are directed to the new ESRI Resources site, which appears to be the new organization of resources for ESRI products. It is nice to see ESRI trying to separate the official support requests from the support resources, even though I am not sure which design will be more useful to the majority of users.
The new ArcGIS Resource Center
The new resources page, for those that did not notice it, is no longer on the esri.com domain, but rather moves to the arcgis.com domain we discussed in the previous post. In the meantime, arcgis.com is still under construction, which the “Coming soon” phrase over an oblique image of the earth. If anyone has any more insights to this, please do share them on the comments section below.
Mar 29
Executive Compensation Mashup by Dave Bouman, winner of the 2010 ESRI Mashup Challenge
ESRI announced the winners of their 2010 Mashup Challenge. 1st place goes to Dave Bouwman and his executive compensation mashup available here.
Second place winner was a social media mapper, that presents real time results from social media websites to a map (see it live here), which seems like a great time killer to me.
Congratulations to all the winners and applicants, and many thanks to ESRI for running this challenge and allowing people to be creative with their products.
Mar 23
ArcGIS.com Online Screenshot from 03/23/10
ArcGIS.com is now online, with a new look and design, and everyone’s favorite web phrase: “Coming Soon…“. A little bit of searching around the internet reveals some information from Vector1Media regarding a cloud-version of ArcGIS in collaboration with Amazon, providing on-the-go GIS functionality.
This is a dramatic change from the previous functionality of the ArcGIS.com domain, which redirected to the esri.com section about ArcGIS. The Internet Archive has a number of older snapshots available here.
Note that the site is currently only available to ESRI employees, that may actually have to request access too. Curiously, the http://maps.arcgis.com/ domain mentioned in this ESRI Blog entry redirects to the same page, even though the screenshots seem to differ. This of course will be different from ArcGIS Online, which is available now in Beta.
Mar 16
An interesting question came about a few days ago. While I have been discussing ESRI’s geoprocessor and how one can use it effectively, I failed to define what geoprocessing is,, either within the ESRI realm or the general GIS realm. In short, geoprocessing is an operation performed on geographic (spatial) data. In other words, it is when one uses data to perform some operations and receiving results. An example would be geocoding. The user provides spatial data (an address), which we geoprocess to identify the output (latitude and longitude). In the ArcGIS world, there are a few methods for geoprocessing: running commands from the ArcToolbox, the Model Builder, the command line and Python scripting (the one I focus on mostly in this blog).
Continue reading »
Feb 11
With the new version of ArcGIS coming out soon (9.4, now 10, tomorrow maybe X), it is nice to revisit the things I would love to see change in the geoprocessor. This is by no means a study on what is missing or what ESRI is doing wrong, but rather what I would like to see in the future. If you have any suggestions, please do write a comment and I will gladly add them to the post (and attribute the addition to you).
Oct 23
Oct 06
There is been some discussion over the internet about ESRI’s decision to drop Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) support after the ArcGIS version 9.4 release. There are blog entries about why this shouldn’t happen, so I decided it is time to introduce an entry on why it should go, and what you can do about it. Continue reading »
Sep 26
Paolo Corti has a very fascinating article I just stumbled upon on how to use PostGIS geometries with ArcSDE in 9.3. Head over to his website for the fascinating article detailing 4 different methods of using PostGIS with ArcGIS.
Feb 19
As James Fee mentions in his post, ESRI made available a new Answer Tree (beta version) to help users solve problems in getting ESRI products to install properly (licensing and registration). James seems to disagree with the use of technology:
“Flash has no business being involved with support sites. It is hard enough to link to ESRI support documents. Granted fighting through the flash interface you can get to a document link, but I have to ask why they bothered with flash in the first place.”
This is a valid point by James, of course, that seems to somewhat disagree with Jithen Singh’s comment of:
“I like the fact that it’s built in flash! Something different from most of the other ESRI sites.”
While I can see the point made by James Fee, Jithen Singh has a valid point. This is a different technology being introduced. While it has severe limitations (cannot link to specific page), the purpose of it is to guide you to the proper page within the ESRI documentation nightmare. It is a navigational aid in the form of a wizard. If ESRI decided to maintain ONLY such an interface to their vast documentation online, this will be a horrible move in my opinion. But by providing such an option, users no longer need to be experts at the ESRI specific support site, but can rather use a wizard like the aforementioned one to find information.
According to my own, unscientific opinion, the following apply to the new Flash Wizardry:
Disavdantages:
- No hard linking to specific pages
- Requiring another layer of technology, even though it is wide-spread
Advantages:
- Wizard-like interface to vast and complex documentation that is hard to find now
- Not forced as the ONLY interface to documentation (yet) and ESRI is asking for feedback
What do other people think of this, and how they communicate this information to ESRI would and should decide how widespread the use of this technology will be within ESRI.
