geoLibro.org

I’ve always loved WorldWind, and was actually a little sad when Google bought up that keyhole thing and made a huge hit of it. I felt a little like Little Richard probably felt when he looked up from his bowl of grass soup and saw Elvis on T.V. Anyway, in anticipation of a USDA-funded project to start toward the end of summer, we’ve been messing with ways to cache map content for delivery in multiple geospatial environments (Google Earth in the browser? Great. With a plugin? Well, I expected that. Only in WIndows? Fuuuuuuuuck you.) I really want this to include WorldWind, and with tilecache I think we can make it happen. Plus it’s fast.

Most of our content will be static, so we’ll precache it and leave it, then the only barrier is getting WorldWind set up in Window…oh, it’s going Java? Nevermind. Maybe I’ll use it in the GIS for Atmostpheric Scientists class next spring or Geoinformatics in the fall.

I guess it’s no coincidence that just as ArcDex was ruminating on the gross and saddening similarities between Microsoft and ESRI the AGX Team gleefully released a preliminary look at a future ArcGIS Explorer interface that looked, well…like a Microsoft Office product. Which is really fortunate, because if anything is going to move AGX out of the realm of a pathetic joke of an afterthought of a farcical not-a-competitor-to-Google-Earth competitor to Google Earth, it’s a rotund, ornately-menued, visually complicated Office clone. Jesus Christ. Bravo, ESRI.

Congratulations to the members of the team that submitted a winning Purdue entry into Google’s “Build Your Campus in 3D Competition.” Those of us working on wikifying 3D geocontent in Rome have had an eye out for just this kind of news, as there is now a very stimulating, appealing, local testbed for some things we intend to do. Well done.

I was reading a particularly obtuse Digg exchange when I came across this (particulars changed):

For anyone interested, Google Earth Coords for Hubbard Park:

41° 39′ 42" N

091° 32′ 18" W

…suggesting to me that even the coordinate system is now being credited to Google. But it also suggests another way to leverage Google’s infiltration for good: if the U.S. government is serious about us learning and using the National Grid (USNG), they need to have Google use it for U.S. locations. That would take care of it shortly, I suppose.

It looks like the hint Senator David Ford let out at IU’s GIS Day keynote is true: Google Earth has been updated with very high-resolution imagery that looks to be courtesy of the Indiana State government. And all of those rural areas whose states haven’t provided Google Earth with high-res coverage are just going to have to groove on that.

Not 12 hours after I first heard that ArcGIS Explorer has been released comes the first (of many, no doubt) instance wherein somebody chooses Google Earth over Explorer because of GE’s name recognition. They even chose to limit functionality in favor of the easy factor GE provides. And I don’t blame them. ESRI and ArcGIS Explorer have a big hill to climb, I’m afraid.

…Because the Movie Recorder and Shapefile Import tools have been made operable even for those who didn’t pay for it. OgleEarth’s RSS feed just announced it, and sure enough it’s true. You can even see a cap of a movie I just made below. And the shapefile import works, but so does importing a previously-rectified .tif (not rectified within Google Earth, but in ArcMap. See that one below, too.

Nobody needs me to monitor news about geotagging, but I have to mention that it’s finally gotten very easy to tag photos with spatial attributes on a Mac. Like it should be. Ogle Earth reports that iPhotoToGoogleEarth’s Craig Stanton has recently and quickly taken advantage of AppleScript support in Google Earth. The result is a small .app called Geotagger that takes a dragged image and ascribes coordinates to its exif fields based on where your also-running Google Earth is centered. Very easy, and a great, great way to tag photos (if you don’t already have a GPS track available to sync to).

And it works, too. Below this is a screencap of four shows’ worth of album art from Tom Waits’ tour through the midwest/east. It proves Geotagger works, yes, but it also reinforces my disappointment at not being able to attend any of these shows (I was busy starting a new job, see, and traveling across the country). I’m almost the centroid of the polygon these four corners would create.

Beginning with The Earth is Square’s post about Geody, a different kind of search engine (that just so happens to be geographic, with results available as WorldWind, Google Earth, Celestia, and Stellarium, I’m collecting a couple of like items into this one post. Next up is a new[?] (WW2D beta 0.99.88). I’m ashamed to say I lost track of this one, thought it was dead. Apparently it’s not, however, and if you’re willing to install your own JOGL libraries you’ll have a new, improved WorldWind-ish GES on your hands. Even if you have a Mac.

And I guess the only other thing was Celestia, another project I hadn’t kept up with. (Wanna know why? Because anything without an RSS feed is dead to me.) Anyway, it’s also available on Macs (not sure about the Intel issue), if you’re interested.

P.S. If anybody want to subscribe to Purdue’s academic calendar as an .ics file, you can do so here, as announced here.

Near the end of July Bull’s rambles mentioned a WorldWind spin-off called Dapple. I didn’t have a way to test it out (I was Mac-only, driving across the country), but James Fee posted a quick review of it. I got a little snide about some user interface stuff (the more Windows I use, the more I become an Apple fanboy), but today let me say that Dapple has some good things going. I recommend everybody try out its WMS implementation at least, and be sure to try out the keyword search function in the table of contents. Ideally, this "lookup" function would be tied to a more standardized, taxonomized vocabulary or catalog (something an enterprising GIS Librarian might want to look into), but it’s still about the only attempt I’ve seen at being able to search for data layers from within the display app (yes, yes, the Mapdex toolbar could be considered). I’d be happy to be corrected on that, by the way.