ESRI Releases ArcGIS Explorer 9.2 Final

Make sure you reboot after installation….or ArcGIS Explorer will take care of if for you if you try and run the program immediately.

Or at least it did for me – no blue screen, just a hard reboot. I was fearful of the next execution with another reboot – but 25MB of data downloaded so far (thank you Task Manager) – and no crash yet….

I think this post will be gone tomorrow after ESRI reads James the riot act for showing everyone how to download AGX.

eek! This thing is sooooo slow. Not near as slick as the ESRI demos :p Google Earth is safe for now.

ESRI may have a different idea on where its going, but that doesn’t make it the right idea. Whether they like it or not, people will compare this thing to Google Earth. If they didn’t want to compete with Google Earth, they should have made the interface look like GE. I have the unwanted task of telling everyone that this isn’t supposed to compete with Google Earth, and then come up with reasons on why it is better to use this THAN GE.

I thought it AE would be better than GE because I’d be able to more easily add our own layers, ie, our SDE data layers. We’ve spent big $$ to implement SDE here. So do you think the SDE data source is a choice when I go to the AE “Add Content”? Shapefiles, yes, file data, yes, Even KML….But an SDE connection? Noooo..That is not an option. I suppose there’s some roundabout way of doing it through ArcGIS Server, but I don’t even have the install disks for that yet…

Ok, so we’ll wait until AGS comes out to connect our SDE data. In the meantime, we can have lots of fun with shapefiles. You can add them, look at them, even make them transparent! … I don’t seem able to query any info from a shapefile, but that’s ok. I can’t think of any reason an end user would need to do something so obscure as that!

Ben Slater- You can “identify” your shapefiles but first you have to go to Tools>Manage Tasks and add the Identify tool. Although I don’t see a “find” or “Query” task, it appears as though you could add this sort of taks if it’s set up as a “geoprocessing service”.

Very nice product! Now I can use all thoes sid files!

AGS has caching so that improves performance. With ArcIMS you don’t have that so you have to generate the image every time.

AGX will not work well in a business setting if it is slow as it is now. Natural resource business like to put the great satellite imagery behind their data. Without some decent base data beneath it and good performance AGX is nothing more than a free version of ArcGlobe – which is an embaressment now to show to non-GIS folks.

Been testing out AGX today (thanks for the download link James!)

For the “coolness”, “slickness”, “gee-whiz” factor, I think GE beats AGX hands down. BUT the ability to upload local shapefiles and rasters, and the fact that AGX is free to use in the workplace (unlike GE), my verdict is that AGX will be WAY more functional than GE on a day-to-day professional basis.

If I want to zoom in and be a virtual tourist to my next vacation spot, I’ll use GE. If I want to show one of my non-GIS coworkers some geospatial data, I’ll use AGX.

To follow up on my earlier comment, there are some obvious issues with AGX, that I’m hoping will be cleaned up once it’s out of beta:

1. Very slow rendering – even with local data. Once the data has been rendered and is available in the local cache, then things speed up quite a bit. But the initial download and rendering seems glacially slow compared to GE or VE3D.

2. Labeling – AGX uses the same unfortunate labeling method as VE3D. All labels are rasterized, and oriented “North only”. So unless you’re viewing your scene with North pointed to the top of your screen, you’ll be craning your neck to read labels.

3. Shapefile symbolization – there seems to be no way to create categorized symbols for shapefiles. So if your polygon shapefile needs to be symbolized based on a field attribute, too bad. Everything gets symbolized with one color only. I guess this is to entice users to develop their own ArcGIS Server services (ESRI is SO subtle sometimes).

4. Computer resource usage – seems to be a bit of a CPU/memory hog too, although this tends to be the norm with most ESRI products in general, so not a surprise.

I’d be curious to see how well AGX performs using a local ArcGIS Server map service as compared to the ArcGIS Online global services.

I already download the AE 9.2… i also download and buy the GE Pro…. my opinion, GE very best choice… the image look so clear and wondefull… AE 9.2 is bad… the image look so awfull…

I have been ArcGIS 9.2 Roll Out Seminar on March ago… they annouce they have AE 9.2 and can be download freely in the internet… they show us the AE… (look familiar, like GE – that is my first expression)… and then i ask them… “You guyz copy GE aaaa….”… kikiki…. they said NOT!!! So liar…. look at the navigation…. so familiar (GE)….

My conclusion… GE very best! AE, is need a lot of work!! The image cannot zoom in as clear as GE!!… but good work for AE worker… keeep on rocking!!!

Not impressed at all with this ArcGIS Explorer so far. It is slower than Christmas. I was really looking forward to having our non-GIS users able to display and query data in personal GDBs. Well, you have to convert the data to a file GDB first. Then, you have to choose the resolution because it has to rasterize your vector data. Hey ESRI, why not keep vector data in a vector format? It is 9 million times more efficient than having to create raster tiles, then wait until it (excruciatingly) slowly builds this cache that it has to build. Being able to tilt the view is great — but Google Earth is much more efficient at drawing vector data and displaying labels (that rotate). I can’t imagine showing anyone vector data using this application. They will grow old waiting for it to display.