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.**
To add to Oliver O’Brien’s “A Year at UCL” slideshow I have uploaded a couple of panoramic photos from visually impressive moments featuring UCL’s Portico Building. As I take more pictures I will add them to this album.
Whilst it is not my intention to write a technology blog, I do want jamescheshire.co.uk to reflect some of my broader interests. For this reason I have devoted this post to the very impressive AutoStitch iphone application. AutoStitch was developed originally for PCs/ Macs as a powerful method of creating panoramic photos. Unlike many other photo stitching tools, the software can handle multiple rows of photos and does not require users to partially align and order the input images before stitching. I found AutoStitch to be very effective and have used it to create very large images from multiple 10 megapixel photos. Best of all the software can be freely downloaded from here and requires no installation.
I was therefore excited to hear that the developers of AutoStitch have created an application (cost £1.19) that enables users to stitch and crop photos on their iphone. I tested the application yesterday.
I took the following photos from Waterloo Bridge, London. Stitching the images (3 in the top photo, 3 x 2 in the bottom photo) together and cropping them took less than a minute on my iphone 3GS (16GB).
I was very impressed with the final panoramas. The iphone (and other thin cameras) are well suited to panoramic photography as the pupil of the lens will naturally be above the centre of rotation when the camera is moved (providing the photographer stays still and has a steady hand!). This means that AutoStitch does not have to correct for large amounts of parallax error when stitching the images. In addition, by enabling users to stitch panoramas on the spot they can assess the quality of the panoramas and re-take any photos that were wonky or without sufficient overlap. Finally, thanks to AutoStitch it is now possible for the mobile uploading of panoramic images to websites without the need for users to create the panoramas on a PC first.
