James Fee GIS Blog

I was talking about web cartography with a client today and he was saying how he can tell any map made with GIS in a couple seconds. While he did admit that he has been fooled quite a bit, he was still disappointed that there really hasn’t been mainstream improvements to quality of maps. [...]

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OK, so I’m going to use my own IMS server to handle the pole projection issue but that brings up a couple issues that I’ve got to figure out.

How to handle data that was not created in polar projections. Martin linked to a paper by Waldo Tobler that hits on some of the issues. [...]

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Dan emailed me a link to these maps that Disney has up for their “Twilight Zone Tower of Terror 13K” run. Take a look at the 13k and the 6.5k maps. They are both really horrible, but take a look at this part of the 13k map.

I’m not sure what happens under that [...]

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I love baseball, I admit it. I subscribe to MLB.tv to catch as many games as I can. My favorite “computer related book” is Baseball Hacks. In the spirit of that, I present the United Countries of Baseball Map.

Click for larger view
via Strange Maps

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Finally, a blog that is devoted to making maps (though post dates show this has been under the radar for a while). For those of you who continue to email me asking why there are only developers blogging, here is your new blog. The ESRI Mapping Center blog says that they’ll focus on; [...]

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Well it finally happened. Adobe has killed Freehand. Everyone is expected to migrate to Illustrator (for a “small” $199 fee). Interesting enough Adobe will still sell Freehand, making things very confusing.
I did some of my first cartography on Freehand many years ago, but I haven’t used it since about version [...]

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Because ArcGIS Online (AGO) is still beta, there are tons of plans to continue adding and fixing datasets. ArcGIS Explorer “piggybacks” AGO so AGX users will want to keep an eye out for the following improvements.

high-resolution 1 meter imagery for the USA

detailed street maps for North America and Europe

USGS Topo Quads

provincial level political map [...]

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I’ve been playing with Adobe’s Flash based color pallet generator - Kuler. It requires the latest version of Flash so you might want to go to Flash.com and pick it up. I’m as color blind as one can be (which is why I go for this black on white blog theme) so I [...]

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I love looking at output from Autodesk Impression. Kinda makes me wish I had stuck with my degree in Landscape Architecture rather than Geography (ok maybe not, but still what is it with all these landscape architects and GIS). The new cartographic representation moves ArcGIS down this route a little so we’ll see [...]

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Says my wife as we are sitting reading the paper tonight. (I was reading the Fry’s Electronics ad so I thought she was talking about that). She throws the local section to me and points to the lead story, “Mapmaker’s work outdated by time it’s printed“. I said I’m a Geographer, I [...]

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Update - Thanks to Daanish for posting a Yahoo! News story updating us on the status of the products. It looks like at least for now both are safe, but you have to wonder for how long. So for now, no worries.
My first computer based cartography work was done on [...]

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