ArcGIS Explorer Blog : Explorer 480

Mapping a Walkabout (and another sneak peek at 480)

ArcGIS-Explorer-Team — Wed, 28 May 2008 04:28:00 GMT

Part II of a two part post on the GIS Education Community blog appeared the other day, picking up where the previous post left off with a discussion of how to take GPS readings and turn them into shapefiles, and then add hyperlinks.

But there's another way to accomplish the same thing, and also new capabilities coming in ArcGIS Explorer 480 which will make things even easier.

One option might be to save the GPS coordinates as a comma or tab-delimited text file, and import the file to create results. We covered this topic in a post back in July, 2007, and while we were working with a much older version of Explorer at the time, the information in the post is still correct. A nice thing about results is that it's very easy to do interesting things with their popups, which we covered in another post not long ago. So these methods could have been used instead of the shapefile creation method described in the Education Community post.

But soon there will be an even easier way. New in Explorer 480 is support for GPX format files. Wikipedia describes GPX as follows:

GPX, or GPS eXchange Format is an XML schema designed for transferring GPS data between software applications. It can be used to describe waypoints, tracks, and routes.

We visited the GPXchange site to download a file of interest, one with locations of hot springs in California. In the soon-to-be-released Explorer 480 we imported the GPX file and created a collection of waypoints from the downloaded file. We'll save the step-by-step details for a later post, after we've released Explorer 480, but we ended up with a result group, with each result representing a waypoint in the file. Here we've clicked a couple of them to open the popup window to display more information about the waypoint.

"Real time" 19th century data - and another sneak peek at 480

ArcGIS-Explorer-Team — Wed, 21 May 2008 17:01:00 GMT

We're blessed with the availability of "real time" content these days, and recently blogged about the upcoming support for GeoRSS feeds in Explorer 480 as part of the landscape of timely information.

Another recent post on the GIS Education Community blog discusses what "real time" may have been like when the earth was still terra incognita using the Pinkerton 1812 map from the Explorer Resource Center.

Below is a screenshot showing the Pinkerton 1812 layer swiped to reveal a sneak peek at the new graticule support we'll be delivering with Explorer 480. This new user option allows your choice of graticule units and the ability to display reference grids such as the US National Grid and MGRS.

Timely information via GeoRSS - Sneak peek at Explorer 480

ArcGIS-Explorer-Team — Wed, 14 May 2008 20:20:00 GMT

Cyclones in Myanmar. Fires in Florida. Earthquakes in China. Timely information is critical for learning about events as they happen, and subsequently how to respond and what to do in their aftermath. One of the ways that timely geographic information is published is via GeoRSS feeds.

In the upcoming Explorer 480 release GeoRSS feeds are one of the supported connections, joining ArcGIS Server, ArcIMS, and WMS.

Here we've connected to the USGS Shake Map feed, and we're showing the popup content for the 7.9 quake that hit China on Monday, May 12.

Below we've connected to another USGS GeoRSS feed publishing all the magnitude 5+ quakes worldwide. Again we're in China, in the vicinity of the disastrous 7.9 quake. You can see the strong aftershocks that followed the original temblor.

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...