Geocortex Blog

As GIS geeks, we love “cool stuff” in a map. Sometimes we love it too much, wanting to throw in features that contribute little to overall usability. I don’t know how many of you saw it, but there was a fantastic parody of form-over-function in GIS from none other than the folks at Saturday Night Live (starting at about 2 minutes in).

And of course, my immediate reaction as a GIS geek was “wow, that’s a cool map”.

We’ve been really busy getting Optimizer ready for its first beta release. All things considered, the final few weeks of development went pretty smoothly. We managed to release the Beta in time for the EMEA user conference with a pretty good collection of features and there were not many surprises. For those not familiar with Optimizer, it is an application that assists with the management of ArcGIS installations and related infrastructure. A key component of Optimizer is its reports. Most of Optimizer’s reports display at least one chart to help visualize the data Optimizer collects. Below is an example of one of those charts.

We use line, pie and bar charts and a few combinations of bar and line charts – nothing out of the ordinary. What was surprising was the amount of time I had to spend looking for an easy to use, reliable, aesthetically pleasing chart control. There just did not seem to be very many good quality candidates. A few products I evaluated looked promising until I saw their licensing terms. Many products required royalty payments for every Optimizer license we sold. I was surprised because we’re talking about a chart control, not some complicated piece of intellectual property that implements a proprietary algorithm. Other candidates were full-featured and buggy or reliable and stylistically awful. In the end, I settled on XtraCharts by DevExpress. XtraCharts are easy to use, reasonably priced ($295 including source code), look awesome and are royalty free. If you need to display charts in an ASP.NET web page or WinForms application, check out DevExpress. You will be glad you did.

I had heard about elephants painting, but I would never imagine that an elephant could send a text message!

From the article: “So they placed a mobile phone SIM card in Kimani’s collar, then set up a virtual “geofence” using a global positioning system that mirrored the conservatory’s boundaries. Whenever Kimani approaches the virtual fence, his collar texts rangers.”

Wow. At the outset, we weren’t really sure what kind of response we’d see for our first Geocortex User Group. I was hopeful we could get 10 enthusiastic users to sit around a table and talk about web-GIS, share their experiences and learn what we’re working on for the future. Nope. Instead, we had 47 join us in Los Angeles last week! Even my own optimistic estimates (30) meant we ran out of feedback forms and refreshments far too early.

Bulging numbers aside, we had a productive meeting thanks to the generosity of Los Angeles County for hosting and managing the event. We spent some time having everyone introduce themselves, I spoke for close to an hour regarding company and technology direction, but most importantly, we had 3 user presentations, sharing diverse implementations of Geocortex IMF and Essentials.

Based on the feedback we received, the event was a success, and the user group is looking at scheduling the next meeting for spring of next year. User groups in Toronto, Seattle, Texas and Wisconsin are getting off the ground soon, so look for one in your area!