ArcGIS Explorer 900: First Look

ESRI have released ArcGIS Explorer (hereafter 'AGE') I'd heard that it has a 'presentation' system like GEarth's tour so I dived in and had a look. In the rest of this post when I refer to presentation I am talking about AGE's system, when I talk about tour, I'm referring to GEarth's system. These are some first notes concentrating mostly on the presentation facility.

Download Problems, PC only: First up I needed to install .NET 2.0 and a server pack to get the program installed. That will have put a lot of newbies off if it is a common need. Oh, and its for PCs only. Grrrr.

Slide Metaphor for Presentations: AGE has adopted a slide metaphor for presentations, so it becomes more like a powerpoint presentation rather than a movie clip, tours follow a movie clip metaphor. Importantly this makes editing a presentation much easier than editing a tour users. Here's some other notes:

Presentation Pros:

• Thumbnails: The slides are represented as thumbnails making it much easier to locate where you are in a presentation than when editing than wading through kml code to edit a tour.
  
• Move, Delete, Recapture: Just as with powerpoint you can move and delete slides. You can also recapture a slide if there's something you want to change on it.
  
• Layer Controls Robust: I have had problems with the robustness of GEarth tours when handling layers (turning placemarks on/off etc). After a few experiments, I haven't managed to fault AGE on this.
• Titles: Slides have a title feature which you can use to put a title at the head of a slide view, it has some nice formatting controls as well.
• Next/Previous controls: Instead of play, AGE uses next/previous buttons, very handy if you want to use it for a presentation. In a tour you would need to code this in as a pause. You can also have a continuous movie like presentation if you wish by setting the slide time to be 10 seconds.
  
• Full Screen: In presentation mode AGE automatically flicks to full screen mode which is a nice touch.
• PowerPoint Import: You can't directly import powerpoint into AGE but by exporting your powerpoint to .png files you can easily bring them in as what are termed screen overlays in GEarth. Editing control of screen overlays in AGE is much easier than in GEarth.
  

Cons:

• Transition time: You can't control the time the transition takes from slide to slide
• No audio record feature (a big disappointment)
• Advanced features of tours such as animating models isn't possible (AFAIK)
  

Beyond presentations AGE has some other useful features I've noticed such as:

• Base maps: A variety of base maps is available
• Data Types: The ability to pull in multiple data types (Arc GIS, KML, Arc GIS online and others)
• Contextual Help: Contextual help is available when you rollover items in the ribbon.
• 4.2 Controller: AGE controller looks a lot like the old GEarth 4.2 controller which many (including yours truly) prefer to the new 5.0 controller.

However its lagging behind GEarth in many features such as:

• Time control
• Historical imagery
  
• Quality of imagery (from my brief flights around),
• Imagery Streaming Speed
  
• Google Ocean
  
• Google Planets
  
• Flight Simulator

Summary: I think this is a very interesting entry in the Virtual Globe market. I think they've recognized that a vital feature (maybe the killer app?) of Virtual Globes is tours/presentations and they're ahead of GEarth in this respect at the moment by making presentations easy to edit and put together. However, all the advantages of GEarth mean I won't be abandoning it just yet.

Relates To:

• My review of Snoovel which is trying to make GEarth tours more editable.
  
• My lazyweb request for a graphical editor for tours in which I suggested that a slide metaphor for tours would be a good idea.