ArcGIS Explorer Blog : E-mail

Exploring the Collapse of Wall Arch

ArcGIS-Explorer-Team — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 19:29:00 GMT

"Geology happens," one of my college professors used to say. Wall Arch, located in Arches National Park along the Devils Garden Trail, collapsed sometime during the night of August 4, 2008. Now that's geology in action.

The arch, according to the Arches National Park Web site, was first reported and named by Lewis T. McKinney in 1948. For the geologists among us, it was a free standing arch in the Slickrock member of the Entrada sandstone. Before it fell, the opening beneath its span was 71 feet wide and 33 1/2 feet high.

Using ArcGIS Explorer we went to have a closer look, beginning by using Find Place to locate Arches National Park.

Below you can see that got us to Arches, but we still didn't know where Wall Arch was located.

To find the location of the fallen arch we went to the Explorer Resource Center (File > Resource Center) and clicked the Layers tab to add the US Topo Maps layer (by clicking on its thumbnail).

Once the topo layer was added we could zoom in and look for the Devils Garden area that the news item on the Arches National Park Web site mentioned. That proved easy to find, and as we zoomed in to view the 1:24K scale topo maps we found that the arch was clearly marked.

We could tilt our view to see how the arch formed along one side of a sandstone rib, typical of many of the park's 2,000 or so arches. Another interesting perspective could be gained by using the swipe tool to examine the imagery underneath the topo layer.

To complete our little geology exercise we used Create Notes to place a point at the location, changed the note title, and added the URL of the news item to the popup note text.

Here's the result (no pun intended).

We saved the result with an adjusted view property and the popup window open, so that when you click here to open it you will automatically zoom to the (former) location of Wall Arch and see the popup display the news item from the park's Web site. We could also have e-mailed the result directly from Explorer. Geology in action, Explorer in action!

Sharing via E-mail Video

ArcGIS-Explorer-Team — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 21:47:00 GMT

Here's a video showing the E-mail capabilities in ArcGIS Explorer 480. The video complements a previous blog post that presents a short tutorial on the same topic.

Sharing via E-mail with ArcGIS Explorer

ArcGIS-Explorer-Team — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 19:18:00 GMT

(View a video of how to share Explorer results via e-mail)

You've always been able to E-mail your saved or exported NMF files, but until the 480 release you've had to do that outside of Explorer. With the latest release (Explorer 480) you can now e-mail an entire map, a layer, or a result directly from ArcGIS Explorer. Here's how.

To e-mail your entire map, go to File and choose E-mail (or hit Ctrl+E).

To E-mail a layer, right click the layer and choose E-mail. Note that the E-mail capability is only enabled for Web-based services that can be shared, not for local data sources that might not be available to the e-mail recipient.

There are several ways to e-mail a result. The first is to right-click the result in the result window and choose E-mail. You can e-mail a single result, or an entire group or results this way.

The second way is to right-click the result on the map, and choose E-mail. Here we've right-clicked a result that is the location of a live traffic cam in the Phoenix area.

The third way is to open the popup window for a result, and choose the E-mail Result option which appears at the bottom of the window. If you e-mail a result with its popup window open, when the recipient opens it the popup window will automatically appear. Here we've chosen one of the traffic cam results, and e-mailed it with its popup window open so the recipient will automatically see the current traffic conditions.

In each of the above cases, the NMF file is generated on-the-fly and automatically added to your e-mail as an attachment, along with some descriptive text. You can add your own message to the text that is automatically inserted, or clear the message and start your message from scratch. All the recipient needs is to have ArcGIS Explorer installed (there are instructions automatically inserted in the e-mail) and then double-click the NMF attachment to view it using Explorer.

For more information view the Sharing content with e-mail Help topic.