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Google trends on Maps and Canadians

Glenn Letham — Fri, 22 Sep 2006 15:59:39 +0000

Poking around Google Trends, I entered a few terms and found something interesting.. what is it about the term “maps” and Canadians?

Interesting to notice that many of the top 10 locations where searches for maps come from are in Canada. Ottawa, Calgary, Vancouver, and toronto are all in the top 10… Do Canadians get lost more often or are they simply more interested in geography?? hmmmm. See the results here – for fun, how about this trend of ESRI vs Autodesk – not very useful but kind of interesting! Finally, the trend in a search for GIS Data tells us that most searches for this term come from Fort Collins and Denver, CO

Anything Geospatial: Tracking developments affecting GIS, geospatial technologies, location-based services, mapping, google earth and google maps. Published by the creator and editor of GISuser.com & LBSzone.com

Fantom Planet Rounds up Bloggers for ESRI

Glenn Letham — Fri, 28 Jul 2006 16:46:38 +0000

Fantom Planet is once again trying to get some bloggers together.. this time its in San Deigo at the ESRI UC.

I hooked up with fantom and a couple of others at Where 2.0 a couple of months ago and we had a great time (although there was only several of us there). Mark your agenda – August 9, 8 PM, place TBD… more details here

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1000 ESRI developers taking in the first Summit

Glenn Letham — Fri, 10 Mar 2006 20:18:42 +0000

Well, the first ESRI developer summit is only days away. Thanks to Clint Brown of ESRI for taking some time to jot down a few comments to some questions I threw at him regarding the summit.

He tells us that the crew in Redlands is quite excited that more than 1,000 developers are already planning on attending the summit (nice number for event #1). What excites Clint and crew? Quite simple… “meeting and talking to some of our developer users”. Brown also mentions that the peer-to-peer sharing that will transpire between developers should be brisk and will make this event a winner. On the menu for the week-end… two days of ESRI’s own developers and product engineers working with the conference attendees to help them solve their developer problems using ArcGIS and EDN. They will show a bit of what is coming in the 9.2 release, but will focus primarily on helping developers get their jobs done.

Another key topic to be addressed includes trying articulate and communicate a framework for what a “GIS developer does” and how a developer should leverage geodatabases, maps, geoprocessing, globes, and so forth in building their application solutions – aka. creating an understanding of what GIS adds to a computing platform. Thanks again to Clint for the feedback. The Dev Summit takes place March 17-18 in Palm Springs, CA – see www.esri.com/devsummit. PS… if Clint brings along his guitar I have no doubt the discussions will continue late into the evening if him and the gang are jamming around the pool!

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ESRI Developer Summit

Glenn Letham — Wed, 01 Mar 2006 16:19:59 +0000

A reminder from ESRI points out that the First annual Dev Summit is only 17 days away.

Normally I would blast off to such an event but this year I’ve opted to hang out at home on March 17th for a change so I can celebrate my kids birthdays – ya that’s right.. 2 of them have St. Patrick’s Day birthdays on the 17th – as a result, a ski trip is on the horizon instead of the usual requisite March trip to an event (March is always the start of a busy travel season!). Speakers lined up to keynote the event include ESRI’s Scott Morehouse (ESRI Director of Research and Development), as well as reps from IBM and Microsoft. More info can be found at http://www.esri.com/events/devsummit/index.html

A Quick Look at ESRI’s ArcWeb Explorer Beta

Glenn Letham — Sun, 29 Jan 2006 14:04:42 +0000

From ESRI… ArcWeb Explorer is a Web-based map viewing application based on Macromedia Flash 8.

The ArcWeb Explorer uses vector mapping technology to render maps quickly in the browser instead of having the server render them. See http://www2.arcwebservices.com/v2006/solutions/awx.jsp for details

You can check it out for yourself at http://redlandsarcweb.esri.com/explorer/index.jsp. Running a “sporadic” wireless connection from my laptop, I managed to connect but my speed wasn’t too great.. either that or this app is a bit of a pig.. I’m not quite sure yet! At first glance the biggest turn off is the lack of panning which I’ve become totally accustomed to when using AJAX map servers (i.e.. think of Google, local.live, etc…). Out of habit I keep trying to pan but this forces a zoom rectangle… totally annoying!

Option menus available to users include Navigate, Find, Directions, and Map styles. The find works ok and is fast, quickly taking me to a location. Searching for Seattle, WA obviously returns a quick “hit” although if you want to locate a place like “Starbucks”, Seattle, WA there’s no POI DB like that at the time. The street maps look pretty nice and major features and landmarks are provided (e.g.. Greyhound bus station etc…), so far though the pan and zoom using the nav tool is pretty slow.. maybe there’s simply too many users testing it.

Testing the Navigation tools… cached zoom levels obviously come up fast, however, clicking the – key to zoom out caused about a 3 second delay for me and place names seemed pretty cluttered on the display. Panning… clicking the “”W” or “E” nav option to pan resulted in about a 3 second delay in regenerating the new display… it didn’t seem very transparent or seamless either as I waiting for black areas to fill in with detail. The left and right arrows didn’t seem to accomplish anything for me at times so that left me a bit confused. After moving around a bit it turns out the arrows function as a “page forward” page back” option… I find this a bit confusing as they really do look like they would be meant for navigation like functionality like panning – Mouse-over tips would be really nice as an additional feature and would have clarified this a bit, however, a bit a customization can easily fix this, after all this is a beta test. For now I’m still messing around… what are you finding??