I attached a link to a video that shows how to use v3MapNotes. The app is simple enough it should be obvious, but there are a few tips in the video you might be interested in.
You can also run the app yourself. It works best on iPhone/iPad on mobile devices, and Google Chrome/Apple Safari on your computer. Android works reasonably well except for a few click issues.
Uncategorized | Steve October 15, 2010 | 
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I started working on Mobility projects about a year ago when I did some project work with the Enterprise Mobility gurus at Sybase-SQL Anywhere. You might think about Sybase as a database company, but their Waterloo-based division has been working on mobility since blackberries were something you’d eat. I spent some time translating between Sybase and ESRI cultures, and I also built some spatial synchronization capabilities between ArcGIS and SQL Anywhere.
After looking at different development options from Sybase, ESRI, Apple, and Google, it seemed to me like all of the right tools are available, but not really in a form that was as simple and powerful as they should be. Platform differences, offline capabilities, and how to handle the special needs of mapping applications are there in principle, but not in a useful example. That started me on a side project to develop v3MapNotes, which is just an alpha release app right now, but could grow into something over time.
Using HTML5, Javascript, and a local Sqlite database, v3MapNotes allows users to edit and share notes on a map. It’s different than other apps like Twitter where you tweet and the location is included, with MapNotes you have a map-first application where you click on the map and enter some notes, then you share notes with other users through some server-side KML (Google/Earth XML documents – a well-known standard).
It works pretty well on iPhone/iPad/Android right now, also Chrome on the desktop. On top of some of the local caching capabilities (it stores notes between browser sessions for example), I really thought that HTML5 was going to solve a lot of the fiddling with HTML elements that I’ve done in previous web applications. So far that’s not true, I’ll be looking at options in the coming weeks on how to best manage the UI portion of the app.
Uncategorized | Steve October 1, 2010 |
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We posted an updated X-Ray for Geodatabases recently. It has been downloaded over 300 times in the last few months, and the latest update has a few fixes for issues encountered building project databases. The main issue was if you saved the design to a new file name the Validate tool was not always working correctly. I also added a feature where if you don’t currently have datasets or domains the Excel spreadsheets will open some default spreadsheets for you.
On a practical note, in some of my project work I’ve been copying and pasting from MS Word into X-Ray spreadsheets to create Geodatabase domains. The general steps I follow are:
1. Open the Geodatabase and edit the domains. This will open up the Excel domains spreadsheet.
2. Copy an existing domain to a new worksheet, set the new name for the domain
3. Copy and paste the list of domain values from the source document. In my project I had lists like:
Pumping Station
Treatment Plant
Storage Tank
4. Some of my lists are long, and I needed to uppercase the values and make the codes and names the same for this project. It was easy to do. First, uppercase the names using Excel formulas like ‘=upper(a11)’,
then copy and paste the values,
then sort in Excel.
The result is a domain all in uppercase, ready to import to my Geodatabase.