ArcGIS 10.2 for Desktop with Jim McKinney & James Tedrick
In this video the two presenters give an overview of their top 10 ArcGIS 10.2 updates. I am not going to detail them all here since that is the point of the video, but I would like to talk about a couple of them.
The first one is the Excel import/export improvements. I do this a lot at my job. At some point all of the project managers got it in their head that you cannot or should not transfer recreational GPS data out of the unit and right into ArcMap so I frequently get hand written or typed lists of coordinates. There are also times where I pump out tables from our field collection devices. As they state there are already ways to do this in 10.1, but it really looks like the interface for 10.2. I really looks like I can just set a few things up and let it go. When I have 15 ASAP jobs the last thing I need is to be copy/paste out for a project manager.
The second part is about GitHub. GitHub is basically a repository of code and resources for the ESRI omniplex. I am starting to develop my own browser and mobile applications at work and this repository is basically going to save a lot of headaches. I took a programming class in grad school, but it was definitely an intro for grads level class. Without the significant background in programming that a lot of people have I am often lost when troubleshooting. This repository is great because you can find the tools you want and rip the code into your application. I am hoping that using these free resources I will be able to really create some useful apps for my company.
Canada & The United States: Bizarre Borders Part 2
This second video is more fun. What I like about it is that it really illustrates a problem that I run into often at work. The world is really big and it is round, except that it is not, and putting straight lines on anything really creates problems. I will have a series of national, state, and local data sets on one map and they will not quite match up. People ask me, "Well who is right?" And there is no answer. One, the other, both, neither are all possibilities. The state of Arizona has over 98,000 sections in it. And that does not even include the fact that we have large Native American holdings and old Spanish land grants that do not have any section markers. When you are dealing with a state of that size, or even bigger in California, Texas, etc., it can be difficult to maintain any sort of concept of straight. If you have a line with a bearing that is 1% off it does not mean much over 1 foot. But it means a considerable amount over 600 miles despite being the same level of error. I do not know if it is more of an issue for us on the west end of the country having states the sizes that we do and as such our data sets are larger and our controls are further apart.. I am curious if the East Coast suffers from similar issues.
What do you think?