If you have a copy of Geocortex Essentials, take a look at the release notes for the 2.2.2 maintenance release we packaged up today. On our Support Center downloads page, you will find the release along with accompanying documentation.
2.2.2 contains some bug fixes, and also includes all of the bug fixes included in the recent 2.2.1 maintenance release.
You’ll read it here first: registration is now open for the 5th Annual Geocortex User Conference, scheduled to take place June 8-9th, 2010.
Same great content, delivered online.
Due in large part to feedback we’ve received from clients, we’ve moved your event online. With so many organizations straining to justify travel costs for conferences and training, we felt it was appropriate to alter our 2010 conference to cater to these very needs.
As in years past, we’ll open the conference with a plenary session Tuesday morning (PST). From there, the conference splits into technical and business tracks, combining live and pre-recorded content, with live Q&A throughout. The conference concludes Wednesday afternoon with a wrap-up session and panel Q&A. Feedback from previous years tells us you derive significant value from user presentations, and these are certainly included.
If you’re thinking about a tranistion from ArcIMS to ArcGIS Server or considering the implications of ArcGIS Server version 10, join us for a pragmatic look at the present and future of Geocortex technology, as it relates to your own organization’s needs.
Hope you can make it!
One of the neat new capabilities of Geocortex Essentials is the ability to integrate oblique imagery generated by Pictometry’s Image Navigator alongside 2-D map data delivered via ArcGIS Server. This can be a powerful tool for planners, emergency responders, assessors, public works and others.
Latitude Geographics has just launched a marketing campaign in conjunction with Pictometry International to develop awareness of this new capability. We recently sent an email inviting customers and prospects to an upcoming live webinar on this topic. The webinar will include the following presenters:
We encourage anyone interested to sign up for this webinar to learn more about this capability. You can view the message we sent, and sign up for the webinar, at http://www.geocortex.com/ENews.
If you have any questions or comments about this, please contact Michael Marek at mmarek@latitudegeo.com.
We hope you can attend!
If you’re an ESRI Business Partner attending ESRI’s Business Partner Conference in Palm Springs next month, we’ll be co-presenting with ESRI to share best practices and what we’ve learned working alongside ESRI and ESRI distributors around the world.
Hope to see you there!
Here’s something that’ll likely pique the interest of many of our state, county, and municipal customers in the United States.
What would people do with ridiculously fast Internet? Google has put out a Request for Information (RFI) to identify communities interested in being part of their plans to build and test ultra high-speed broadband networks (1 gigabit per second, which is 20-100 times faster than what most people currently have) in a handful of trial locations in the United States to explore this very question (among others).
The RFI response deadline is March 26.
To finish the series on my favorite features included in Geocortex Essentials 2.2, this installment will describe the Media Player Integration.
Media Player Integration is actually more of a category, than a single feature. In fact there are a number of features which together describe the integration. At its core, media player integration provides a set of tools allowing users to select one or more features on a “media-enabled” layer and display the associated media (audio, video or imagery).
Now, media integration in any GIS wouldn’t be complete if it didn’t have a spatial component. That’s why we’ve added a “temporal geocoder” (a term coined by Jeff Siemens, the developer who wrote it). The temporal geocoder associates points in time with XY coordinates on the map. This allows us to animate a cursor, “following” the feature along the map while the associated movie is playing. As the cursor moves along a line feature (for example), the associated video displays what was captured at that location.
Video can be captured of pipelines, power transmission lines, highways or a sewer pipeline, along with the XY coordinates at snapshots in time along the video. By hooking up the video files with a layer in Geocortex Essentials, you can skip along various points of the video by clicking on points which intersect the associated feature, then watch the video play out from any point of interest. Of course, if the media is not spatially enabled, Geocortex Essentials will simply display the media associated with the features on the map.
I got an iPod Touch a few weeks ago, and made extensive use of it during a recent overseas business trip to check and respond to emails as I encountered available Wi-Fi (even when I had my laptop, I often didn’t feel like booting it up).
The primary disadvantage for me is typing with my thumbs using the on-screen keyboard, which I find not unlike typing with my elbows on a standard keyboard. Consequently, my in-transit emails became increasingly minimalistic. Like telegrams, actually.
I’ve never liked the standard Sent from my iPhone/iPod/Blackberry message because the purpose of this statement seems unclear (could be construed as advertising, bragging, or simply providing totally irrelevant information in the spirit of social networking).
Today I got a brief email response from someone that contained the following disclaimer:
– This email is from my handheld and may have been brief. ~
I like it. Problem solved.
While working on the new installer for Geocortex Essentials, I spent a fair amount of time looking at Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF). One of the things that WPF does particularly well is data binding. Having said that, I discover that there seems to be an easy way and a hard way to do it. The easy way is to ensure that collections you wish to data bind to implement IObservableCollection and that objects within those collections implement INotifyPropertyChanged because the WPF data binding engine will exploit these constructs if they are available.
To see why this is a good thing, imagine a DataGrid bound to a simple array of simple objects. If you were to add an item to that array or modify an object within that array, the results would not be visible until you refreshed the data binding. If instead you were to use a DataGrid bound to an IObservableCollection containing objects implementing INotifyPropertyChanged, changes to that collection and objects within that collection will be reflected immediately within the DataGrid with no extra programming required. How simple is that? One further gem that I discovered was that it is possible for a WPF application to consume a Windows Communication Foundation service (WCF) and realize the service’s collections as IObservableCollection containing INotifyPropertyChanged objects This makes it extraordinarily easy to create rich, distributed WPF applications.
Until next time…
When I announced the release of Geocortex Essentials 2.2, I mentioned that I would be posting on a few of my favorite features. Today I want to discuss the “Toggle Layer Labels” feature.
Now, this feature isn’t exactly flashy but I like it for a few reasons:
You can toggle labels on a layer from the Layer List Action Menu.
Before
After
Last month, Dave and I participated in a local fundraising event that had us jumping into ocean off Fisherman’s Wharf to raise money for the local food bank. We said we’d take the leap (and both donate $300) it if staff donations totaled $1000. About an hour into the challenge, it was clear we were going for a swim.
Here it is:
In addition to food donations, Latitude staff raised a total of ~$3100 cash for the Mustard Seed Food Bank this year.
