AGXcellent? Not Quite Yet.

I was like a kid in a candy store last night and stayed up way later than I should have when I found out that ArcGIS Explorer was available for download. I’ve really been waiting for this since rumors of it’s existance began.

What I like:

Aggregation of a variety of services and formats.

Native support for MrSID

• I have nearly 150gigs of SIDs for Texas. Various years of NAIP, DOQQ, and Municipality, County, Regionally collected aerial photos. Along with some private source imagery. All of the stuff we use is 2 years or less old. Data quality ranges from 2m CIR to 0.5ft TrueColor. It is all better than what you can get from any of the free web maps and nearly all of it is better than ArcWeb’s DigitalGlobe Standard imagery. We also use some ArcIMS services for some county’s annually updated super high-quality aerial photos. The last thing I want to do is convert all this into ECW or JPG2k. We get updates pretty regularly of different areas so continual data conversion is not something I really want to do either. We have NO budget for ArcIMS or ArcGIS, so finding a way to use our imagery in its existing format has been our biggest challange to distributting our data over the web.

Creation of custom tasks and geoproccessing models

• We want a few very simple editing and feature creation tasks. I don’t need a full suite of GIS tasks. Keep it simple, keep it focused.

Fully skinable

Simple but powerful navigation and interaction methods

All of the above, except the tasks without programming

What needs to improve:

The STREAMING SUCKS!!

• Come on! I’m testing all of this on the same machine and it takes 3-5 times longer to load base imagery than ArcMap 8.3, and guess what, those are being read of the same disc as AGX and AGX is cacheing them. After going to one area, seeing the imagery of it again should be lighting fast, but it is SLOW!
• The ArcGIS Online servers are definately not handling anything nearly as quickly as GE, VE, or Yahoo. That said, even if they were, would we know it? When even local imagery loads slowly, imagery from external sources is like watching a maple syrup race in January.

No easy way to change the styling of imported data sources once they are in.

• Should offer to read .lyr files in addition to shape files. All the styling info it needs, including visiblity scaling has already been recorded there. Why should I have to go through all that again, using unfamilar scales of km or mi above earth’s surface. (By the way to help with that you can use the formula provided in an earlier post)
• Even if you don’t read .lyr files, then you should at least give an easy way to restyle a layer that you have added from a local or external data source. I understand not restyling layers from GIS server, WMS, or KML as they should have all the styling info they need in them. But importing a shape file doesn’t come with any styling info and trial and error of import, delete, re-import just isn’t cool with me.

Label support is poor and much more difficult to manage than in GE, GMap, Yahoo or VE.

Bottom line is that this is NOT going to truly challange GE/VE. This could be a good 3D enabled simple GIS client that is highly customizable without the use restrictions of GE. The general population doesn’t need a true GIS. They want a great GeoVisualization System with the ability to see data they are interested in draped over 3d enabled imagery. AGX is CLEARLY not trying to be this. It is a ArcGIS Server client that can be repurposed for some other uses for those who are above the general masses in thier GIS needs but don’t need a fully functional professional GIS.

That is exactly what I’ve been looking for, but I don’t think there are that many people in this same position. This is going to be a niche product. If they can get the speed up to some reasonable level, I think it will a really good one.

I’m going to see how well this works with Manifold WMS tonight. I’ll definately be posting more about this in the next days and weeks.