ESRI have just launched their ArcGIS for iPhone Application. I have tested it out and thought I would share a my first impressions. I conducted the test on my iPhone 3GS running software version 4.0.1 and with 1 to 3 bars of 3G signal.
Overall I found the app to be very impressive. You are greeted with a world map that you can instantly interact with by panning and zooming in the usual way.
The map tiles loaded surprisingly quickly- it took approx 5 seconds to zoom from the above view to building level with only 1 bar of signal.
Users can search for places of interest…
…but this provided the only disappointment with the map appearing to lack the required data.
Zooming out a little resolved this problem, but I am not sure how many people would think to do this. I suspect the problem is relatively easily addressed and may well be in future updates. Offering standard maps is not particularly innovative and not what the app sets out to achieve. The real innovation is the ability to view layers available from the ArcGIS.com website. You can, for example, use OpenStreetMap as the base map
or overlay additional information, in this case the Gulf Oil Spill Forecast:
Navigation to layers is straightforward:
I especially like the fact that users can add their own servers and also bookmark their favourite layers. On top of these features users can measure distances and calculate areas.
I found these tools to be extremely intuitive and I expect they will become an integral part to many field based introductory GIS courses. In a recent talk I attended, Jack Dangermond said that GIS software in the past was made to be complicated. With this application ESRI have demonstrated that GIS can be made to be easy. I think all who use this app both from within and beyond GIS with be genuinely impressed.
**I have just discovered a more in depth review worth reading from James Fee’s GIS blog.**
UCL Department of Geography is proud to be an ESRI Development Center (or Centre). Each year we have to submit a report that outlines the past year’s activities. We have had another busy year hosting two visiting professors (Prof. Keith Clarke and Prof. Keiji Yano), receiving over 1 million visits to our research blogs and outreach websites and helping to organize the AGI Education Keynote given by Jack Dangermond. EDC researchers have presented over 20 conference papers and published in over 20 peer reviewed journals. My own contribution is shown on this blog and my slideshare account. For those who want to know in more detail about the UCL Geography EDC activities the full report can be downloaded here.
David Maguire, Jack Dangermond, James Cheshire, Paul Longley
Jack Dangermond head of ESRI, the world’s largest GIS software company, presented the AGI Education keynote at UCL on Monday 7th June. The talk entitled “Some Developments in GIS” focussed on current innovations in GIS software and on the direction in which the field is heading. He acknowledged the instrumental role that UCL has played in the development of GIS with, for example, one of the first GIS PhD theses, written by Roger Tomlinson and supervised by Peter Wood, originating from the Department of Geography. Jack also gave credit to Carl Steinitz, a former lecturer of his and now visiting professor in the Bartlett School of Architecture, for instrumental input into his academic development.
The Department of Geography was the first outside of North America to be awarded “ESRI Development Center” status and has been working closely with the company. Each year the Development Center awards its Outstanding Student of the Year prize. This year, I had the honour of being awarded his certificate from Jack Dangermond after the lecture. Jack was interested in my research, having already searched for the spatial distribution of ‘Dangermond’s’ using the UCL Department of Geography’s WorldNames database.
Jack was in the UK to be awarded the prestigious Founder’s Medal from the Royal Geographical Society. During his acceptance speech he spoke of what GIS has already achieved and its growing potential to improve people’s lives throughout the world.
I have embedded below Jack Dangermond’s recent talk at Where 2.0. It introduces the exciting opportunities provided by what Dangermond calls “GIS in the Sky”. Thanks to Alex Singleton for sending me the link to the video posted on GIS and Science.
Following a slightly critical post about the map featured on ESRI’s Geomedicine website I thought I would balance things with a post on a good example (in my opinion) of a mapping service from ESRI. I was really impressed with their Free Embeddable Maps website. Users can select from a number of demographic measures such as population density, median age, average household size and population change between 2000 and 2009 and map them at a range of scales. Maps can be personalised using a title and direct links to the creator’s website or their email address. My map of New York Median Household Income is here. It would be good to get more data and coverage beyond North America. It would also be nice to enable multiple overlays (perhaps using different forms of representation on the map). The page is only beta so these additions may follow.
I know this kind of thing has been done before, such as with the London Profiler Website, but ESRI’s contribution is remarkably simple to use. Users with no GIS experience will be able to create a map in under a minute. It can then be embedded in a any web page or linked to via bit.ly. The interface is well-thought out and users can read additional information from the pop-outs that appear when the map when they click on an area of interest. The maps deserve to be utilised by a range of users, but I expect educators and their students stand to benefit most from this excellent free service.
As a proud ESRI Developer Centre we were disappointed to see the map on the front page of ESRI‘s recently promoted (via twitter) Geomedicine website. The front page (screen shot below) shows an interactive map of the USA. On it users can overlay heart attack rates (per 100,000 of population) and alongside data showing the locations of reported incidents from the Environmental Protection Agency’s Toxic Release Inventory. Both imply a clear east/ west split across the US with the east fairing worse in both cases. An instant and perfectly reasonable reaction to this visualisation is that heart attacks are caused by the release of toxic material. I felt encouraged to make this assumption by the questions above the map: “What environmental exposures have you personally experienced in your lifetime?” and “Would any of this geographically rich information be useful at your next physician visit?”. Of course, medically, the natural conclusion from the map is spurious, so why have ESRI published it? Scroll to the bottom of the page to the disclaimer which states that no causal link between the datasets is implied and that their intention is “present some of the data about geography as it relates to human health”. By the time you make it that far down the page and squint a little it is too late. I think ESRI could have put a little more thought into this. At the very least they could have shown more data sets, being careful to avoid those that appear to correlate. Changing the “small print” at the bottom to larger more prominent text would also improve people’s perceptions of this map.
The UCL Geography Department has been officially awarded ESRI Development Centre (EDC) status. Paul Longley is the EDC Coordinator and as an ESRI (UK) sponsored PhD student I am the EDC GIS Specialist. This is great news as we were awarded the EDC status over a year ago (the first department in the UK to achieve this) but have not been able to benefit from the additional software licenses or award the “EDC Student of the Year” as logistical and legal problems have had to be overcome. These are all sorted and we can now crack on with cutting edge research using ESRI software. For those interested a report on our past year’s activities as an EDC can be downloaded here.
