I’m usually an early adopter of all things software but I have to admit that I’ve been so busy lately I haven’t had much time to update to ArcGIS 10 Desktop yet. I moaned to my ESRI rep a few weeks back and have media sitting on my desk waiting to install… (Still haven’t gotten our ArcGIS Server V 10 media yet). The truth is that I’ve been busy working on the server side of things namely playing around with the Flex 2 Viewer (beta) while waiting for my new computer to arrive no sense in installing 10 twice . The good news is that the beast arrived today the bad news is now I have to backup and get prepared for migrating to a new machine while trying to finish that Flex app… I’m having fun but its getting a bit tiring thinking about my growing to-do-list that  is getting bigger everyday as well as the other  looming projects. What’s a multi-tasking running out of time GIS nut to do?

  About a year ago I was having a little chat with a developer of a application that we were interested in purchasing for work and he informed me that they were no longer focusing their development efforts on that application since it was based on the Web ADF and the Web ADF was dead… He informed me that they were  moving towards Flex and Silverlight . I was excited at least about the Flex application having spent some time with the ESRI Flex Sample Viewer.  I have a couple of applications out there that are based on the Web ADF one of which will be a lot of fun to migrate and the other we paid a lot of money for this company to develop. The app itself does many things and is useful but it has been holding up our migration efforts for some time. Whenever ESRI releases another version I’m like crap we have to migrate that thing… The fact that it has become that thing says a lot as well. It’s not interactive, its not fun, icons don’t fly across the screen like in the Flex apps and we’re like boring… We’re already tired of the look and feel and want to change things but behind this behemoth are some pretty useful tools that we still can’t replicate on the Flex side with some serious programming effort and money both of which is lacking in our “shop.”

Thus, when I read today that ESRI plans to deprecated the Web ADF…

Based on customer feedback and technology trends, we see the Web ADFs playing a decreasing role amongst ArcGIS Server developers in favor of alternatives such as the ArcGIS Web Mapping APIs.

The Web ADFs will be deprecated in the next release after ArcGIS Server 10.

I was reminded once again of our beloved app. I can migrate the others with not much loss but this one, not sure… the whole thing will have to be re-worked.

Sometime last week I received a message from my favorite GIS Software company AKA  ESRI that ArcGIS 10 was available. I read on with delight until I noticed that it was available for download. I read on and noticed that there was a little bit of  info there for requesting media so I logged on to the customer support portal… I had already requested media from a previous message almost a month ago so I called downstairs to see if any media had arrived. I was told no. I read more on the customer portal and followed the links which BTW took a long time to load in my browser. Heck the long weekend was near so I figured folks were sucking up bandwidth. To my utter annoyance there was a statement saying that backup media was going to take 6 weeks. 6 Weeks? Must be a mistake! I was not happy and mentioned to our ESRI rep in no uncertain terms that this was unacceptable. Given that we are paying over $20K in maintenance per year for the software (the cost of a half time staff which I desperately need), waiting 6 weeks to get media is just ridiculous! So now they are dividing customers with low bandwidth and high bandwidth first they stopped shipping us a nice box with media and users guide I actually used those things now we have to download our help files and users guide and now we have to download these large files which does not play well with our IT folks at all. No they are not happy when I download large files during regular working hours… When you add  ArcGIS Desktop, ArcGIS Server and the extensions that we need to download that is some serious bandwidth and sorry to say but its not like their servers are as fast as the Google Servers  even loading their " free basemaps” to use in our web apps  is a hog on our server…

I just think its a shame that ESRI has chosen to treat its paying customers this way. If you have large bandwidth you can have ArcGIS 10 now. If you have not its a 6 week wait for you. Sucks! I won’t repeat what my colleague called them when I relayed this bit of info.

My oh My! Its been a while since I updated this blog. I’ve been busy to say the least. Since my last post the iPhone 4 is on preorder, iOS 4 is out with over 100 new features even for us 3G and 3GS users, oh and the Mac Mini has a bit of refresh with its new Unibody self. Bummer its no longer available for $599 entry price it seems to have gone up by $100 (what’s up with that?) Apparently BP repositioned a containment cap on the underwater gulf gusher that’s been causing all kinds of health problems and other issues for those folks living in the affected areas. Hope that the cap holds this time. We’re worried about oil around these parts ourselves mainly gas drilling and hydrofracking.

So what have I been doing these past months. I’ve been diving into the ESRI Flex World a bit mainly for work and also just getting some away time from my computer. Its been fun but I’m seriously wiped out. I’m off to get some shut-eye long day tomorrow. One more thing… there are now 4 groundhogs that have taken up residence on my property we have a bit of an understanding so they stick to the un-mowed areas of the grass. At some point there will be too many of these creatures to manage so I’m looking into a way to deal with their case…

I was browsing around the ArcGIS Resource Center earlier today and came across the ArcGIS for iPhone site at ESRI.

I was a little in shocked actually but was happy to see that ESRI is finally showing the iPhone some GIS attention. Perhaps it was brought on by the iGIS iPhone app from Geometry who knows either way we won’t get our hands on it until summer since the ESRI iPhone app is still in development unless you are using the SDK. There are some interesting videos here. It will be interesting to see how things rolls out in the summer… This would make more sense to me via an iPad for the extra screen real-estate but if the user interface is similar to iGIS (this is available now for $19.99) it would be nice esp. given that the ESRI app and SDK is free.

Man as soon as I don’t have my Mac anymore they release all this cool software that I was waiting on. One of which is this little Mapping illustration program called Ortelius.
Ortelius is a Mac OS X program that allows you to create you own maps with layers, labels, colors, and a nice set of drawing/editing tools (including auto junctions). Best of all you an import ESRI shapefiles so you don’t have to start from scratch and it includes scales, geographic intelligence. Its a cartographer dream and a mapmakers fancy. Wish they had this for PC so that I can download and test it out.  Ortelius goes for $99 standard and $49 for student. The professional version is in the works. Tons of tutorials here and screencasts so you can learn how to use the product. I’m just glad to see that the product was released after hearing about it a few years back. If you would like to do more traditional GIS work on the map look no further than Cartographica. Ortelius will help you to make maps quickly especially for presentations and publishing.