Tag Archive for 'ESRI'

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ArcGIS on Mac OS X

Published on July 2, 2006 in Geotech. Closed Tags: , , , , , , , .

ArcMap on Mac OS XSome might go out and play Minigolf on their free weekends, I stay at home and fiddle around with some geo things on my new MacBook.

As result of this afternoon I got ESRI’s ArcGIS up and running on Mac OS X. Of course with a little help of a virtual Windows installation in the background.

What needs to be done?

Well, first I had to decide which virtualization software I want to use. Basically I had a closer look at Apple’s Boot Camp and Parallels Desktop (aff link). Whereas Boot Camp doesn’t count as virtualization tool, it just enables booting and running Windows on any Intel Mac. That was mainly the reason why I didn’t go with Boot Camp. Every time you need Windows-only software you’ll have to restart your machine. In the case of ArcGIS I’m not planning to use it on a 10 hrs/day basis on the laptop, it’s just an “emergency” installation, to edit and modify some minor things on the way or to use it for presentation and demo purposes. So in the end I downloaded and installed Parallels Desktop.

There are of course some other tools available, like Virtual PC for instance, but after a quick research on some reviews I decided to focus on Boot Camp and Parallels Desktop for my purposes.

What about perfomance?

RAM limitationsActually I was positively surprised by ArcGIS’s performance in Parallels Desktop. I expected it to be sluggish and painfully slow, but it wasn’t at all. To complete basic tasks and do some map editing it’s quite ok and usable. The main limitations are RAM and video card. On Parallels Desktop you allocate a certain amount of RAM to your Windows installation, 512MB in my case. I think you can only allocate the half of your built-in RAM as maximum.

Virtual video driverThe video card is another major drawback: Windows sees a virtual graphic card with only 8MB of VRAM available. Not too much if you’re planning to do some 3D visualization (which I won’t). However, I’m wondering how ArcGIS Explorer (3D!) is performing under this conditions since there won’t be a Mac version.

A Windows installation enabled by Boot Camp accesses all of your RAM, makes use of your video card instead of emulating its own and the processor isn’t occupied with Mac OS X tasks while you are working in Windows. There are good chances that ArcGIS will act somewhat faster too.

Parallels Desktop 4.0 for Mac

Something else?

No luck with GPS so far. The Garmin GPSmap 60C is recognized by Windows but not by MapSource. I wish Garmin would fix their USB issue and come up with some Mac support. It can’t be that hard, other devices seem to work just fine.

Along with Apple’s switch to Intel it’s now easier than ever before to use Windows-only applications (like most GIS and GPS software) on Mac OS X. There are various virtualization products available which deliver good Windows perfomances. Using Boot Camp even gives you the full perfomance of your machine, considering some missing hardware drivers (Boot Camp is still beta). Let’s see in August what comes with Mac OS 10.5 out of the pipe.

Where 2.0 day #2

Published on June 15, 2006 in Geotech. Closed Tags: , , , , , , , .

Where 2.0: Patrick HoganThere are dozens of posts out there that cover very well the second day and all the talks of Where 2.0. So I’ll briefly sketch my personal highlights of today (as I did yesterday):

I really got impressed by the effort of NASA’s World Wind team to improve their product and their enthusiasm behind all their work. From an EULA point of view it’s quite clear that in a professional environment NASA’s World Wind is the only option to go (by now) if one would like to use globe applications:

  • World wind has no use restriction,
  • it’s 100% open source software,
  • extendable due to their add-ons,
  • direct integration of WMS (and soon WFS),
  • supports GIS file formats like ESRI shapefiles.

Once the place names can be accessed via WFS and don’t have to be packed into the application itself, the download size (60 MB at the moment) will significantly decrease to probably only a few megabytes.
Support for more platforms should be achieved in fall 2006 as World Wind is currently ported to Java. Well, not only ported but reprogrammed as far as I understood today.

Apparently, for Autodesk did the concept of Open Source make sense, as they claimed that the revenue is made in other segments of the mapserver market than selling server software and they could meet user needs better by adopting Open Source development cycles for parts of their product portfolio.

There were only a few GIS talks at Where 2.0, but they made me wanna try some of the shown tools like OSSIM and GRASS (well, GRASS I tried once but had not the time to dig deep enough into it).

Pretty funny was the presentation of Donald Cooke from TeleAtlas! I definitely will get a copy of “Fun with GPS“.

Mr Jack Dangermond demonstrated the strategy of ESRI products: author, serve and publish. The audience saw a demo of ArcGIS Explorer (incl. Jabber chat), how data is edited in ArcGIS Desktop and published as WMS on the server. Quite impressing was the demo of ArcWeb SVG Map Viewer, which illustrated with a view clicks the power of the-next-big-thing-since-5-years SVG by changing to various projections, applying different styles and switching layers on/off without reloading (no, not even asynchronous!) anything. To me it became quite clear the ESRI isn’t heading at all into this Where 2.0 market, they clearly stick to their professional GIS business and concentrate in providing the technology to enable the back-end for services like Google maps (I don’t know if Google maps is using any ESRI technology at all…).

Check out this excellent Where 2.0 photoset at Flickr (btw, wasn’t Stewart Butterfield on the speakers list?) and the roundup written by the Where 2.0 co-chairs.

See you next year at Where 2.0, 19.6-20.6.2007, Fairmont Hotel, San Jose, CA.

ArcGIS ArcPublisher bug

Published on April 25, 2006 in Geotech. Closed Tags: , , .

I should consult more often ESRI’s support forums, user to user help is working well there. This morning I found a workaround for an annoying ArcPublisher bug: opening a folder with a .pmf in it froze my explorer, almost every time. Here is the workaround. ESRI please fix it, this bug is known and documented longer than 1 1/2 years now!

Enhancing ArcWeb’s SVG capabilities

Published on March 14, 2006 in Geotech. Closed Tags: , , , , .

Andrea Rosso has posted some amazing details about further SVG development on ArcWeb Services. Due to their REST API, ArcWeb Services already offer some basic SVG output.

Apparently ESRI is just about to enhance ArcWeb’s SVG capabilities and release sort of a SVG ArcWeb Explorer, similar to ArcWeb Explorer based on Flash. Unlike the existing Flash version, you’ll be able to download the whole viewer including all sources and customize it in order to fit your needs. Since JavaScript plays an important role when it comes to interactivity and SVG, he points out that it’ll be quite similarly to a JavaScript API. So it should be fairly straightforward to embed ArcWeb SVG into your applications or create your own mashups.

Another highly welcome detail is that he mentions Firefox’s built-in SVG support in his post. As well the screenshot on his site shows Firefox demonstrating ArcWeb SVG Viewer. If ArcWeb SVG works well in Firefox I assume that it will be truly platform independent, something one could hardly achieve while Adobe’s SVG Viewer was the only serious viewer for SVG (cf. DOM implementations on Win/Mac/Linux browsers for instance).

If you got interested by now in what’s going on with ArcWeb and SVG you should keep your eyes open for ArcWeb Labs (to be opened soon). According to Andrea ArcWeb Labs should give some insights and information on unreleased applications.

ArcWeb Services providing an advanced and easy to use SVG interface means a significant progress for the acceptance of SVG as webmapping technology. You may look forward how this will work out.

Update #1:
Head over to Kerry Coffin’s post to get some more information about ArcWeb’s SVG Viewer (e.g. available widgets, perfomance in Firefox vs. Adobe SVG Plugin) and see a few very promising screenshots!

ArcGIS on Mac OS X?

Published on March 12, 2006 in Geotech. Closed Tags: , , , .

Parallels Desktop 4.0 for Mac

Great idea! I’m wondering if it would be possible to run ArcGIS in Virtual PC under Mac OS X at a professional level. Any experiences? Especially the ESRI hardware dongles give me slight headache.

Flash vs. SVG round #2

Published on February 20, 2006 in Geotech. Closed Tags: , , , , .

TigerSome years ago SVG was considered as the next generation of rich media and animation in the internet, as a sort of Flash killer. Nothing happened. Flash technology enhanced and is still widely spread. SVG enhanced too and even went mobile but it’s still a good kept secret.

Now, ESRI & Yahoo! are implementing their webmapping services based on Flash technology. Last week Google silently enabled SVG in their latest API update (API v2.37) for Google Local.

Honestly, it’s quite a time since I did my last Flash development but back then (it was version 5 I guess) I never would have choosen Flash as a tool to be used in a webmapping application. Actually the decision for a vector graphics based webmapping application was then in favour of SVG. Flash’s object handling and ActionScript was too unfunctional for my purpose: I wanted to load geographic objects on demand (e.g. on changing view extents) out of a PostgreSQL/PostGIS database and map them in a web browser, without continuously reloading the whole map of course. SVG was the easiest way to go. As a XML based vector graphic format it allows you to edit, put attributes and styles as you want to every single object within your map. On the other hand vector graphics as SVG required more potential clients compared to raster pictures delievered by mapservers. All objects were handled – requesting & rendering – on the client side (JavaScript was used to access and parse XML, something like “pre AJAX”, to name a buzzword) while the user was interacting with the map. However, after this work I became a big fan of SVG, especially when it comes to webmapping. If there wasn’t this plugin-dependency, which resulted in every single discussion to be the main showstopper for SVG. With native SVG support in a popular browser like Firefox hopefully things start to change.

Back to Google Local: in SVG compatible browsers (such as Firefox 1.5) one can now use SVG rather than PNGs to draw polylines if following parameters are set:

_mSvgEnabled = true/false … to enable/disable SVG in SVG compatible browsers
_mSvgForced = true/false … to force the use of SVG in every browser (even if not capable of displaying SVG correctly) or limit SVG to compatible browsers.

If SVG is not “forced” Internet Explorer 5.5+ will still render polylines with VML (something like a rudimentary SVG…).

This simple comparsion gives an idea what can be done at what perfomance with SVG.

“It draws a random polyline with 100 segments. You can change the
number. There are “Redraw with SVG” and “Redraw without svg” buttons.”

SVG is a well elaborated standard. Maybe Google Local is the push that this technology needs.

Another interesting point on the Flash vs. SVG discussion is the take-over of Macromedia by Adobe. Now we have both technologies under one umbrella. Why not merging them together? Or at least bundle them to one single plugin. Since XML support is already built into Flash, why not extend it to SVG?

ArcGIS 9.2 includes GML and KML support

Published on January 21, 2006 in Geotech. Closed Tags: , , , , , .

James Fee reports that ArcGIS 9.2 ArcView will support OGC GML Simple Features and KML by default. This means an important step for interoperability!

Annoying ArcGIS bug

Published on December 26, 2005 in Geotech. Closed Tags: , , , , .

ArcGIS 9.1 Service Pack 1 was released last week. A day before Christmas holidays I had the chance to install it and run a quick test. A PDF-export made some problems that day, minor problems: certain lines remained for some unknown reasons grey while they should have been white, people kept asking if we could color the line white, somebody had to explain why the line is grey and not white, followed by another attempt to export the PDF. So in the end this “minor problem” cost a lot of time and money. Once I had Service Pack 1 installed this behaviour was gone and the line was exported white as it should – sort of early Christmas present.

Especially the various adressed export-to-vector-graphics-issues called my attention. As far as I can remember Illustrator export for instance was more reliable before 9.1. Regularly we encountered problems with CMYK colors and the listed font-size-issue. I still have to check if all those problems are gone with Service Pack 1 and ArcGIS now proper exports to Illustrator.

However, in my quick test I focused on one bug. Besides reproducible bugs that cause full system crashes is this the most annoying one I’ve ever seen since I use computers:
I’m or better I was using the non-US regional setting for numbers on my system. Outside US we tend to use a “.” as thousend delimiter and “,” as comma. For some reason ArcGIS is the only application on my machine which doesn’t want to take this system wide setting over. It ignores them and only accepts US settings (“.” as comma and “,” as thousand delimiter). Still more confusing is that it only happens on my machine! The other ArcGIS installations work fine with non-US settings. The problem is that every time I want to edit a number in ArcGIS it gets confused about thousand delimiter and comma. For instance a stroke width of 1,00 points which is reasonable for non-US-settings (meaning 1.00 points) is considered by ArcGIS as 1,000 points as it would be entered in an US-system because it takes “,” as a thousand delimiter and not as comma.

ArcMap ErrorSo it gives me two of this popups, every time on every single input box on every opened window. I don’t know how much time I already spent on clicking those popups away until I changed my regional settings to US standards (as the only one in my company). So far I didn’t run into problems with other applications or data exchange with some colleagues. On certain formats we have to mind that we’re using different comma-settings.

Funny thing is that our local ESRI support first denied the problem, after I insisted that I’m not blind and if he wanna come over to see it our local ESRI support admitted that he believes he can remind that he has seen this behavior one time before. Finally he told me that they already knew the problem, that it apparently depends on certain hardware combinations and that ESRI developers know it for about 2 years. Due to the fact that they can’t reproduce that behavior it has not been fixed yet.

ArcRespond

Published on November 7, 2005 in Geotech. Closed Tags: , , , , .

ArcGoogleSo ESRI is responding to the dynamic Google brought into geo-business. Good, some competion generally helps improving product quality and maybe even increases public awareness of geoinformation. Google already has done an amazing job with releasing Google Maps and Google Earth. Within a few months people who barely knew web mapping got enthusiastic (“I can see my house!”) about those services. Developers took advantage of the freely available API’s and built even more applications (e.g. Geobloggers). In other words, during summer 2005 Google brought plenty of live back to geo-business.

Recently ESRI announced the release of a new product which will be released 2006: ArcGIS Explorer seems to be made to conquer Google Earth. Even though ESRI is the world leading GIS company it’ll be hard for them to make up lost ground on that market. Google released the first beta version of Google Earth at the end of June 2005. Now, 4 months later, Google Earths file format KML (Keyhole Markup Language) is becoming very popular for distributing simple geodata online. MapInfo already officially supports KML and there are certain ways to tell ArcGIS to export KML (through the FME extension or with the help of KML Home Companion for instance). Some companies and authorities are evaluating KML to add it to their existing web services and access the Google Earth community – see the Google Earth section on PortlandMaps.com for some inspiring examples. A quite impressive movement within the last few months, considering that we’re talking about a “home user toy”.

However, it won’t be easy for ESRI to achieve such a high penetration – media appearance, community activities and installations – as Google Earth already has. Just compare news entries or community sites concerning Google Earth with those about NASA’s World Wind. You’ll notice a slight quantitative difference.

Nevertheless ArcGIS Explorer seems to come with some interesting features:
-) the ability to use various online data sources like ArcIMS, OGC WMS, OGC WFS and display them together with local data like GDB’s, shape files, image formats and KML (I think Google Earth Pro can handle some GIS data formats too)
-) it’ll be possible to perform (probably basic) GIS tasks.

Time will tell if home users get attracted by those features or if ESRI will stick to professional users, which is not a bad deal for them at all. Google on the other hand will probably integrate Google Earth and Google Maps closer to its core services, which are by nature targeted on the mass market.

As an ArcGIS user I’m wondering about the way how ArcGIS Publisher, ArcReader and ArcGIS Explorer will work together, whether they complement, substitute or are entirely independent from each other.

Rain, Gold & Surfers

Published on May 14, 2005 in Other. Closed Tags: , , , , .

Züricher SeeCombining two business trips allowed me finally to visit a friend in Switzerland. Traveling trough valleys, looking up rocky and steep mountains like those in Tyrol (the only ones I know so far) always reminds me of the power of mother nature, of the fact that human being is only a supplemental part of this planet.
However, the region around Zürich where I spent a few days is unlike the valleys in Tyrol a wider one, as far as I can tell a nicer one. You find the lowlands around the lake of Zürich bounded by an impressive vista towards the alps. And what can be more worth of living like a city on a lakeside.
Unfortunately it was the whole weekend raining.

Schengen?The swiss people are very closely connected to their local government. I don’t think they could assign even some public duties to a far away institution like the EU administration in Brussels.
But if they should panic and generally be afraid of the EU like some politicians want them to be is another question.

The next station on my short trip was a day in Innsbruck and I finally had the time to take a picture of the “Goldenes Dachl” (golden roof).

At the same time the Ice-hockey World Championship was taking place in Innsbruck. That’s why some weird dressed people were crossing your way those days in Innsbruck.

Surfin' MunichFrom Innsbruck I went to Munich to attend the german ESRI user conference. This was my first time at a ESRI user conference and I must say that it was more than useful. Unlike other conferences I attended in the past, which were not company driven, I found out a lot how to optimize my daily work with their software, especially the ArcGIS client, about functions, tricks, etc I never would have found nor used (because almost nobody knows them). An interesting detail is that there was no Open Source exhibiter, only the big commercial ones like Tele Atlas or other ESRI distributers. But I found a leaflet of AmeiN! (or on Sourceforge), an ArcGIS extension to ease the use of UMN Mapserver within ArcGIS. Quite interesting, have a look on it!

A thing I never would have expected to see in Munich are surfers.