James Fee GIS Blog

&Kevin Martin emailed me telling me that his great Export to KML has been updated:
WHAT’S NEW IN VERSION 2.4:

implements KML version 2.2
attributes from the GIS database stored in the output KML as “schema” items
labels and information points can now be vertically offset

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UPDATE: I have no idea why ESRI doesn’t believe in permalinks so all those links below do nothing special. Sorry.
I’m not going and probably most of you aren’t either so this might be your best bet as to getting an idea what might or might not be said Monday morning.
ESRI International User Conference 2007 [...]

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Rob Elkins and Dave Bouwman have some great posts on the morning sessions. Rather than repeat what they’ve written I’ll point you in their direction.
Rob Elkins - 2nd Annual ESRI Developer Summit
Rob Elkins - ArcGIS Server takes the Stage (Author - Server - Use)
Rob Elkins - Plenary Session continues..
Rob Elkins - Online GIS
Dave Bouwman [...]

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From an email this morning:
james, love the blog! I have a question that I hope you can answer. I was looking at some of the downloads on ESRI’s ArcScripts site and noticed that they are all listed as having a license of “public domain”. Downloading ET GeoWizards LT, I don’t see any [...]

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Looks like Richie has been hard at work on the next release of GeoChat. You might remember it from about 6 months ago. I’ll give it a shot this week but until then these are some of the new features:
What’s new with GeoChat 2 for users?
1) New user interface (see screenshots),
2) Office-style alerts [...]

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We had a little rain last night so I figured I’d spend my morning looking for ways to bring Doppler radar imagery into ArcMap. There are of course a ton of ways (and at 9.2 you’ll have even more), but one simple ArcScript caught my eye. NOAA/NWS WEATHER FOR ArcGIS 9.X gives ArcMap [...]

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Over the weekend I saw that ESRI posted two code samples of SVG ArcWeb services for vb.NET and C# in “ESRI Labs” (or ArcScripts for some of us). I’m going to be traveling for the rest of the week so I won’t be getting into this code for some time (I had ignored the [...]

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Autodesk has smartly jumped on the “labs” bandwagon and created Autodesk Labs. They’ve posted a Google Earth extension to AutoCAD 2007 which allows you to publish 3D models right into Google Earth. I believe our company is upgrading from AutoCAD 2006 to 2007 soon so I’ll have to give it a shot when [...]

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I’m sure many ArcInfo users have been stuck on an ArcView license and tried to perform an erase. I know I have and usually forget that you need ArcInfo so you have to exit out and change the license. Well today I saw an ArcScript that allows ArcView users to perform an erase. [...]

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Is there an ESRI labs? Well not technically, but you can find some “lab quality” stuff in ArcScripts. I got to thinking about this when I saw Zillow introduced their own labs section. Specifically this quote caught my attention:
“Every now and then, someone writes a tool in their “spare time” (i.e. nights [...]

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I’ve been pretty hard on ESRI about commercial scripts being in the ArcScripts section of the support site. Well Brian Goldin told me to take a look today and it looks like most of the commercial software I knew was gone. I believe Brian said ESRI has gotten over 800 alerts sent in [...]

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Looks like ESRI is trying to get a handle on the ArcScripts disaster.
ArcScripts is intended for the free exchange of scripts and tools related to ESRI software products. Please alert the moderator if this script is a demo, trial-version, or an advertisement for a retail product.
Get cracking and remove all those commercial ArcScripts.
Update - [...]

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Most of our work in my office is related to facility planning for the U.S. Navy. Years ago, one of the first things we’d try and get when we started a project was General Development Maps (GDM) for the installation which were usually in CAD and usually tiled. We’d usually have to develop [...]

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Update - ESRI emailed to let me know that they do try and clean ArcScripts out, but things slip thought. I wonder if the better solution would be to approve all ArcScripts before they get posted, that would sure stop it.
I won’t go off on my rant about commercial software in ArcScripts since I’ve [...]

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It appears that ESRI has rolled out a new search tool for their support site. The new search also has a link at the top to perform the same search in EDN. One nice feature is that you can customize your search settings by product (ArcCad, ArcView 3.x, ArcWeb, etc), areas (ArcScripts, Data [...]

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OK, this isn’t the product that we saw at the User Conference, at least as far as I can tell (I left my laptop at work so I don’t have a copy of ArcGIS to test it on). Rather than being built on MSN Messenger, GeoChat supports Jabber allowing you to use any Jabber [...]

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I’ve been sitting on this email from Kevin Martin about an update to the popular Export to KML extension for ArcGIS Desktop.
just wanted to let you know that there is a new version of ExporttoKML available that corrects the problem of displaying extruded polygons in the newest version of Google Earth. The were not displaying [...]

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Update - GeoChat has been released.

GeoChat is one of those programs that ESRI has talked about in the past, but then went silent about. The thought among most of us is ESRI abandoned it, but it appears it might be released really soon.
click for larger view

If you’ve missed ESRI’s announcement at the 2005 UC [...]

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Well it seems to have calmed down. I’m not sure what happened, but it seems like I hit a nerve with the post, which was not my intention (I was actually posting about Mapguide, but hey what are you going to do). I got an email from someone in the press who wanted [...]

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Link - Export to KML 2.0
Export to KML is an extension developed for ArcGIS 9.x by the City of Portland, Bureau of Planning. The extension allows ArcGIS users to export GIS data in “keyhole markup language” (KML) format for viewing in the free Google Earth data viewer. Any point, polyline, or polygon dataset, in any [...]

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