A look at ArcGIS Explorer Build 600

http://www.spatiallyadjusted.com/2008/04/02/look-at-arcgis-explorer-build-600/#comment-33966

For those of you who didn’t get to see Build 600 in person at the Business Partner or Developer Summit this March, the ArcGIS Explorer team has posted a screenshot with the new “ribbon” interface. It does look really nice and the usability is much improved.

10 responses so far ↓
· 1 Dude // Apr 2, 2008 at 6:57 pm
At first I thought the newest releases of ArcExplorer was just a pathetic response to Google Earth and MS Virtual Earth. But now that I’ve spent some time in all three, I’m really thinking that ArcExplorer is the best of all of ‘em! AE rocks when you figure it all out. It is ESRI’s best viewers they’ve ever released, and it’s FREE, of course. Amazing. Probalby can thank Google and Microsoft for providing that incentive to ESRI to make something this good free. AE has good imagery, the navigation controls rock, the 3D viewer is the best (including the ability to exaggerate terrain, fly through it in a better way than most of the others), and The ability to load in our own data, including kmz files (sketchup 3d models!) is over the top. Anyway that’s my take on it. I’m not an ESRI guy, just providing my view on it. Try it out and really dig into it, if you haven’t already. Kudos to ESRI on this one.
· 2 Dude // Apr 2, 2008 at 7:34 pm
Sorry, I meant “ArcGIS Explorer” above, not just plain old ArcExplorer. ArcDude.
· 3 Tim Maddle // Apr 3, 2008 at 5:36 am
Looks great. I think Build 480 is supposed to bring performance improvements, which would definitely be welcome in my case.
· 4 Ron // Apr 3, 2008 at 6:50 am
Thank you Google.
· 5 John Brosowsky // Apr 3, 2008 at 7:28 am
Thank you ESRI. The vision for ArcGIS Explorer is really a great one and its really becoming clear now how ESRI is putting a lot into this. It already does way more than google earth and VE. I for one am really interested in the upcoming explorer stuff talked about at the dev summit:
- explorer embeddable control for developers creating custom desktop apps (google earth does not have that, VE does not have that)
- web control to put 3D mapping in a web application (google maps / earth does not have that)
· 6 Ron // Apr 3, 2008 at 8:18 am
John, if it weren’t for Google can you honestly say that ESRI would have developed this at this time?
· 7 James Fee // Apr 3, 2008 at 8:52 am
Well they did have ArcGlobe. Who is to say they wouldn’t have made a 3D viewer for ArcGIS Server Globe Services? ArcGIS Explorer is about selling ArcGIS Server, not about competing with Google.
· 8 John Brosowsky // Apr 3, 2008 at 8:56 am
I think yes - if there was no such thing as google, ESRI would still today have a great 3D globe app that they would be continually evolving based on new technologies. Remember ESRI’s 3D analyst extension, as well as ArcGlobe came before Google Earth, and ArcExplorer was free before that right? Maybe the keyhole guys were influenced by all of that. Who can say, and who cares? But we can certainly say now that explorer is on a great path and ESRI is doing a really good job at it.
Look, sure there is no doubt that Google earth was sucessful in some compelling and new ways, that has made lots of people think.
But now today, I for one am most interested in an embeddable component, as well as a web component, so that I can develop my own very vertical domain specific apps with the now common “globe feel and experience” but with my own UI and tools.
I can’t do a custom VE app on a stand-alone computer that’s not connected to the web, and I can’t do a google earth app in a web browser. I also can’t drop a GE control onto a windows form and develop my own app . So I welcome those things from ESRI.
I am interested to think about how an embeddable explorer control positions against ArcGIS engine, and now an explorer web control will fit into ArcGIS Server. Since ESRI talked about it at the dev sumit, we are all free to speculate until we get more info from ESRI.
For that matter, I am also interested in ArcGIS Online + the javascript API - which can replace Google Maps, and VE for 2D mashups - but ESRI does not yet know pricing for “non-free” applications of this technology. From what they told us at the dev summit, its free for users inside your enterprise, but not free for apps open to the web - which would be the opposite of say VE. But that’s another topic to shake out, maybe someone knows more than me on that - I would like to hear it if they do.
· 9 bender // Apr 3, 2008 at 1:37 pm
this app is completely useless because ags gets confused with the layer order in its globe services. one layer per service is not valuable.
· 10 Jason // Apr 3, 2008 at 4:45 pm
Looks remarkably like Office 2007. One just hopes it delivers a little more functionality than a word processor.