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.

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The image below shows how the labs features are presented:

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MapChat 2

MapChat 2, a wonderful spatial mapping web-based application has been publicly released. This tool enables spatial discussions to enhance the production of local knowledge and public discourse. A demo version is set up for users, so go ahead and give it a spin. There are many features in this release, documented below.

• Threaded chat/discussion.
• The ability to attach arbitrary spatial footprints to chat messages.
• Continual discussion over specific spatial footprints.

The tremendous value of this application comes from its power to enable discussions not only about place, but also in place. The discussions can begin about a specific feature on the map (attached to existing spatial footprint), or about a feature that is not currently present (a new spatial footprint of significance to a user). These discussions can then lead to an agglomeration of spatial footprints of features on the ground that no one has collected data for yet, like play areas for children, or hiking trails, or anything else.

Congratulations to the MapChat team for this accomplishment.

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1. Holding the Alt key and clicking on a data frame will activate it.
2. Reversing selection can be done by pressing Ctrl-U.

Head over to the ESRI Training Blog entry to read the rest.

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[..] our Bing logo is floating in the ocean evangelizing to scuba divers [..]

No related points found for this point.

When is a feature not a feature? This is an interesting question, whether one talks about Google Maps or Facebook or any other application that is delivered as a service. There is no option for users to not install this feature. Even though Google does offer the chance to return to the old Google Maps (by specifying you need the English language as a default language), this may not be appropriate. In essence, Google Maps introduced a feature that you need to opt out from, rather than opt in. This comes with no prior announcement or a grace period. While in most cases, this can be good for developers, is it ideal and good for all? I think the people that will be disadvantaged by this should outweigh the possible benefits. Perhaps Google should make this an opt-in feature instead?

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Google Street View Car in Chinatown, Toronto, courtesy of Wikipedia

There is a lot of speculation about the data, including where Google may have procured the data. There are some simple answers for this, as well as many unanswered issues remaining. To tackle it first, there is one great source for road data for Google, and that is their Google Street View Vans/Cars. Those cars are equipped with a good enough GPS to enable the correct georeferencing of all the images taken. Those coordinates, bundled with some OCR scanning Google can do to find street names and the laser range scanners to identify width of road can ultimately assist Google in creating a dataset that may be even more automated than the traditional TeleAtlas methods.

Of course, information like parcels is not easy to achieve using such a method. As James Fee speculated, this can perhaps come from local governments and institutions, but there are multiple problems there as well. Oftentimes these organizations offer their data free online for non-commercial usage. Is Google Maps and Earth commercial if they bring in revenue? Most often. the data require some sort of monetary transfer between a user and the organization. Has Google bought all the data, or received the data for free in some way for exchange of services?

Regardless of the issues, Google seems to have managed what was thought to be improbable: collecting data from a great magnitude of small governments, compiled them and provided them online for people to use free of charge. Whether this will be viewed as evil in the future or not remains to be seen, but for now, Google seems to be doing better than all government initiatives for data interoperability and single warehousing solutions.

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5 Reasons ESRI is dropping VBA support

1. Microsoft has stopped licensing VBA to third party applications in 2007 (source).
2. Tied with the above reason, Microsoft has also stopped any and all developments for the language, as well as the compiler and interpreter (source).
3. The popular Microsoft Office for the Mac version 2008 has dropped support for VBA. Even the company that created VBA is not willing to support it in some cases (source).
4. ESRI has promised to further develop the geoprocessing objects in Python. As a result, VBA and Python will be in direct competition, if they both remain. With VBA being phased out by Microsoft, ESRI is forced to enhance the support for other rapid application development languages available, and Python seems to be the choice.
5. Other major vendors that used VBA (see AutoCAD) are phasing it out, as Microsoft stopped licensing it to them (source).

How to manage the migration from VBA

1. Follow the ESRI sponsored lectures on migrating your VBA code to the .Net platform (source). This would bring you into a similar environment.
2. Become more familiar with migrating VBA to Visual Studio and Visual Basic by following the documentation Microsoft provided (source and source).
3. If you do not wish to migrate to the .Net platform (VB.Net, C#, etc), then it may be time to begin learning Python. While ESRI does not provide similar functionality as VBA to Python, the promise is there, and it would be a good time to start (source).

Since there is nothing one can do to maintain VBA support in ArcGIS, perhaps one of the above suggestions will work. The rest of the complaints will probably not be heard by ESRI, since Microsoft is not willing to listen to their corporate customers either.

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