Category Archives: Developer
Congratulations to Annual Award of the Forums MVP Winners!
We have our latest and greatest Forum MVP Winners here to announce. Twice per year we award MVP prizes to those users who contribute the most to our forums, based on the points they earn as you vote on their posts throughout the year. Our forums continue to be the most popular community tool for discussing, sharing, and helping one other to get the most from ArcGIS, as we have over 15,000 active users, 22,000 new threads and over 40,000 posts per year. What helps us to be so successful though, is you, our users. We like to recognize those that put in the time and effort to continue making our forums thrive!
We have some new MVP badges in our list!* Welcome to the team, folks! MVP badges do not need to be renewed. Once an MVP, always an MVP. We also give them additional tools like the ability to move a thread from one forum to the other in order to give your questions a better chance of being answered. They can also mark an answer as being the best one by clicking the green check mark. See more about the MVP Program here.
Not only are the MVPs badged so you can find them, but they’re also eligible for prizes like software, books, training courses, and conference seats as a collective ‘thank you’ from us for all of their great effort. First we have our top three Annual Esri MVP Forums users who are being awarded from May 2012 – April 2013:
Robert Scheitlin rscheitlin
Mathew Coyle mzcoyle
Anthony Giles ad_giles@hotmail.com
Next, we are awarding the following Semi-Annual Esri MVP Forums users who are being recognized for their contributions from October 2012 – April 2013:
Robert Scheitlin rscheitlin
Anthony Giles ad_giles@hotmail.com
Wayne Whitley* Wayne_Whitley
Mathew Coyle mzcoyle
Curtis Price curtvprice
Shaning Yu* shaningesri
Richard Watson rlwatson
Rhett Zufelt* rzufelt
Caleb Mackey* Caleb1987
V Stuart Foote vsfoote
Again, thank you so much to all of you who help to continue building a great system that supports our Esri community.
ArcGIS API for JavaScript Version 3.5 Released
Version 3.5 of the ArcGIS API for JavaScript is now available! Please refer to the What’s New in 3.5 for the full list of features and bug fixes. Highlights include:
Continue reading
Here’s why we’re excited about the new Android Location APIs
The ArcGIS Geotrigger Service leverages the latest Android and iPhone technology, when these services improve, our technology improves. Our goal is to make the best cross-platform location services for developers, leveraging the best capabilities of the native location services available for existing consumer devices.
On the iPhone, we’ve leveraged the native geofencing APIs to offer improved battery life compared to using the GPS directly. On Android, there have been minimal location services available from the SDK, essentially limited to turning the raw GPS device on or off.
Three new location APIs were announced today at Google I/O. This is great news for anyone building location-based applications. We’ve been eager for Google to improve the Android location services.
Fused Location Provider
The Fused Location Provider utilizes all of the communication sensors in the phone including wifi, GPS, and cell network, while using only 1% of the battery that previous APIs used.
This is a new service that will greatly improve any application that uses location services. We will improve the ArcGIS Geotrigger SDK for Android significantly by taking advantage of the new Location Provider. Expect to see much better battery life on the Android Geotrigger SDK in the future!
Geofencing
The new Google Geofencing APIs allow apps to respond to the user entering or exiting a configured geofence. The API allows each app to define 100 geofences simultaneously.
This is great news for the ArcGIS Geotrigger SDK, since we will be able to leverage this service to provide better battery life and performance in the SDK. Previously we were limited to turning on and off the GPS device. Now we will be able to use the geofencing API in combination with our optimization algorithms to better provide our Geotrigger service.
Activity Recognition
The new Activity Recognition API uses machine learning classifiers to determine whether the user is walking, cycling or driving. Apps will be able to adjust their behavior depending on the user’s mode of transport. This is done in a very battery efficient way, no GPS is required.
We will leverage this new API to make further improvements to managing the native location services, and it should open up possibilities for some interesting new apps to be built.
The ArcGIS Geotrigger Service
The ArcGIS Geotrigger Service allows developers to easily manage Geotrigger rules with a simple cloud-based API, while also supporting geofences defined as polygons. You can configure an essentially unlimited number of Geotrigger rules in the API, and only the nearby ones will be synced to the phone, making it easy to handle the limitations of the native APIs.
Many of the battery life issues people experience are due to poor implementations of using the Apple and Android location services. It’s easy for a developer to leave the GPS on all the time, but that drains battery quickly. The Geotrigger SDK efficiently manages the native location services and optimizes the server communication required to send location data, saving battery life wherever possible.
The improvements to the Android location APIs are fantastic news and will result in improved Geotrigger services and a better experience for developers!
Aaron Parecki
CTO, Esri R&D Center, Portland
Amber Case
Director, Esri R&D Center, Portland
ArcGIS for Flex 3.3 Released
Version 3.3 of both the ArcGIS API for Flex and ArcGIS Viewer for Flex was released on Monday, April 29th. This is a minor release focusing on enhancements of existing functionality, improving workflows, updated localization, and bug fixes. As a … Continue reading
Discover San Francisco Hackathon
Last weekend Esri joined forces with Airbnb, the City of San Francisco’s Mayor’s Office of Innovation, and GAFFTA to put on the Discover SF Hackathon. This event brought together designers, developers, and entrepreneurs to hack the urban experience by promoting discovery and exploration for residents and tourists alike.
ArcGIS API for JavaScript Doc Update
We’ve published some updates to the JS API docs. Specifically:
- More samples in our sandbox. Samples that are a single file now have links to our sandbox where you can edit and see changes live. Where applicable, sample description pages now have links to the sandbox.
- OAuth samples. We’ve published two new samples showing how to use OAuth with ArcGIS.com. Authenticate within a page or in a popup.
- Preferred argument aliases. Because all modules are AMD compliant at version 3.4, we want to encourage developers to use standard names when naming local references to modules. The API reference now includes a preferred arg aliases table.
- New tutorials. We now have a tutorial showing how to use the Directions widget and an AMD version of the Build your first application tutorial.
Enjoy!
10.1.1 Update 1 for ArcGIS Runtime SDK for iOS now available!
First off, thanks to everyone who came out to the Esri International Developer Summit in Palm Springs. It was great to meet you, share in your passion for technology, and get clear and direct feedback from you.
Some of you at the conference reported to us performance issues you were experiencing in your iOS apps after upgrading to version 10.1.1 of SDK. Some of these issues have also been previously reported on the user forums. We’re happy to announce today that we have an update that will greatly improve performance of your iOS apps by reducing memory and CPU utilization of the display subsystem. You can download the update here.
To our international users, we would also like to point out that this update adds translations for 6 new languages – Danish, Estonian, Hebrew, Latvian, Lithuanian, and Portuguese (Portugal).
We encourage you to try out the update and let us know how things go. As always, we’ll be listening.
MapKit 2 ArcGIS Project on GitHub
We are pleased to announce the MapKit 2 ArcGIS project is now on GitHub, enabling developers using the Apple iOS MapKit to migrate, without any code changes, to the ArcGIS Runtime SDK for iOS. Continue reading
The new ArcGIS Runtime SDK for OS X Beta is available!
We are pleased to announce the release of the ArcGIS Runtime SDK for OS X. This is a new SDK release for the Mac platform. Applications created with this SDK can either be installed or be distributed using the Apple … Continue reading
The ArcGIS Runtime SDK for Qt 10.2 beta is now available!
Esri is pleased to announce the beta release of the ArcGIS Runtime SDK for Qt.
ArcGIS Runtime SDK for Qt is designed to help C++ developers use the Digia Qt framework to create highly functional GIS applications that use local services, yet the applications can have a small footprint. Local services allow for disconnected work in the field; an ArcGIS Server connection is not required.
