ArcGIS Explorer Blog : Developer Summit

Dev Summit Example Source Now Available

bszukalski — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 17:17:00 GMT

Edan Cain, Software Engineer on the ArcGIS Explorer team, has recently posted the source code for his sample that was demonstrated at the recent Developer Summit. You can download it from the ESRI Support Center downloads.

ArcGIS Explorer 600 - A Sneak Peek

ArcGIS-Explorer-Team — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 20:34:00 GMT

The next release of ArcGIS Explorer - Build 480 - is coming up quickly, with some important new features and enhancements. But at the recent ESRI Developer Summit plenary session we took a longer look ahead, beyond Explorer 480, and showed the first public demonstration of ArcGIS Explorer 600 and its new user interface.

The goal of ArcGIS Explorer 600 is to build on the foundation of previous Explorer releases while improving usability and making it more accessible to non-GIS users through the adoption of a new Microsoft Office-style ribbon-based UI.

Using the new ribbon user interface will make the functions of the application easier to find and experiment with. The ribbon also makes it possible to display only the functions that are applicable to what you are doing and hides controls that are not relevant. Other key aspects of the new user experience include:

Better map content management
Easier access to ArcGIS Online basemaps
Improved window management

Like Explorer 480, Explorer 600 will also include some new key functions. One of the big changes coming up in Explorer 600 is the ability to view your map in both 2D as well as 3D. You'll be able to easily toggle the view between both modes to visualize your geographic information in different ways.

Stay tuned for more on the upcoming Explorer 480 and 600 releases...

AIRS Curtain Plots Custom Task

ArcGIS-Explorer-Team — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 00:45:00 GMT

One of the custom tasks shown during the Developer Summit plenary was authored by John Grayson, a veteran of ESRI's Applications Prototype Laboratory. Here's his description of the task.

This ArcGIS Explorer task has been implemented to visualize data collected by the AIRS satellite, a project of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The AIRS site provides the following description of the technology:

The Atmospheric Infrared Sounder (AIRS) looks down at the Earth and measures the infrared brightness coming up through and from the atmosphere. The AIRS optical system splits infrared radiation into its constituent "colors". The effect (but not the technique) is similar to rain drops splitting sunlight into a rainbow. The wavelengths used are sensitive to temperature and water vapor over a range of heights in the atmosphere, from the surface up into the stratosphere. The term "sounder" in the instrument's name refers to the fact that temperature and water vapor are measured as functions of height. AIRS also measures clouds, abundances of trace components in the atmosphere including ozone, carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, methane, and sulfur dioxide, and detects suspended dust particles.

The data was preprocessed from its original HDF format into a geodatabase where information about when the data was collected and to which swath it pertained is maintained. Additionally, curtain plots (vertical rasters) for each of the five attributes were generated as a server-side process. The task starts out by reading the geodatabase and enabling the user to specify which date and swatch to visualize. The screen capture below shows the custom task interface, which allows the user to load the data and choose from different types of information to display.

Footprints of each swath are drawn, and below they can be seen as blue rectangles on the globe.

Using the custom task UI, the user can choose from a variety of types. The task uses OpenGL to load the curtain plots for the specified type, date, and swath onto the display. Shown below is the complete set of curtain plots showing carbon monoxide levels for one of the swaths.

A slider control allows the user to quickly visualize one curtain plot at a time, providing a simple exploratory tool to visualize the data in the display. Shown below is one of the curtain plots, and using the task slider the user can move forwards and backwards in the curtain plot sequence.

Here is another example, this one showing ozone levels. You can compare this to the earlier screen capture above in this post showing carbon monoxide levels.

The task leverages the ArcGIS Explorer SDK and it's support for integrating custom OpenGL implementations. The task makes use of exposed events that tell us when the application has finished drawing and when OpenGL calls can be made. OpenGL allows the developer to create tasks that perform visualizations that are not otherwise possible via the Explorer API, and provides a wealth of potential possibilities for the Explorer developer.

BPC and Dev Summit - Some Custom Tasks

bszukalski — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 17:16:00 GMT

Last week was a busy week for the entire Explorer team, with lots of interesting things happening and lots of great discussions in the Showcase area and elsewhere at Palm Springs. We appreciate all of your comments and feedback. We'll be highlighting some of the presentations and those discussions in a series of posts beginning this week.

First, here's a few things that were shown during the ESRI Business Partner Conference and Developer Summit plenaries. We've covered some of the general things that we typically demonstrate in previous posts on the ESRI Federal User Conference, Petroleum User Group meeting, and GITA, so we'll focus on some of the different things that were shown last week.

One of the custom tasks demonstrated is one you'll find on the Explorer Resource Center. Just choose File > Resource Center and choose the Tasks tab.

The one we chose is the Weather Finder task authored by Michael Waltuch, one of the lead designers on the ArcGIS Explorer development team. Just click to open the NMF file, which will add the task to your current session. To learn more about this task click the Description link on the Resource Center entry, or choose About Weather Finder on the task UI. You'll learn the following:

Weather Finder locates the nearest weather station to a specified location and reports its most recent weather observations. The task is based on a reverse geocoding web service located at GeoNames.org. To learn more about GeoNames go to their web site and see the service description.

The popup window associated with the weather station includes a link to the National Weather Service's Telecommunication Operations Center which lists more information and a 24 hour summary for the weather station.

This is a good example of a custom task which has been written using the ArcGIS Explorer SDK to work against an existing Web service - In other words it's a mashup.

Using one of the Portland bookmarks, we right-clicked the pushpin to use the Send To capability to use this location as the starting point for the Weather Finder task. The bookmark itself is the result of a task (the Create Notes task in this case), and when you take the result of one task and send it to another we refer to that as task chaining, and you can read more about that in the Help.

Here's the result of the Weather Finder task, the closest weather station to our Portland bookmark. In this case it's located at the airport. If we click the result pushpin you'll see the latest weather information in the popup, including links to the NOAA site providing more detailed information and historic data for this location.

We also used a task we obtained from the Showcase area on the Explorer Resource Center. The showcase is a place where anyone can contribute tasks, results, or other items they want to share with the Explorer community. We chose the Flickr Task authored by Rob Dunfey, a member of the ArcGIS Explorer SDK team who also authored a blog post with more details about the custom task. This task is another good example of a mashup with other existing Web-based APIs, in this case it uses the Fickr API.

Here we typed in "portland" to return the first 20 Flickr photos tagged with that keyword. Each of the results can be clicked to open a popup displaying the photo.

Another task that was shown was a custom geoprocessing task, authored using the Model Builder in ArcGIS Desktop and published using ArcGIS Server. The task's UI was automatically generated by ArcGIS Server, based on parameters specified by the task author. The ArcGIS Explorer SDK can be used to modify its UI, but we just used the default, automatically generated one.

Here we've used Send To again to use our Portland bookmark as the input location for a 1 and 3 minute drive time analysis.

In upcoming posts we'll cover more of what was shown, including some of the technical details of the plenary and workshop presentations, and also cover some of the things we showed that are coming in future releases.