You're listening to episode 759 of a very spatial podcast, April 20th, 2025. Hello and welcome to A VerySpatial Podcast. I'm Jesse. I'm Sue. I'm Barb. And this is Frank. And this week we're gonna be talking about stuff for Frank's topic. But first some news. First up in the news, some good news from Noah. The GOES, I dunno, is it go or GOES? I, I always say GOES just because I think it sounds cooler, but it's probably go anyway.
The GOES 19 satellite, which is the latest and I guess final satellite in the GOES R series has been officially certified as operational and is now go as east. So that's exciting. It's got some upgrades and some cool stuff. So it's replacing go is 16 and continues to look at our, our hemisphere. So in addition, it's also equipped with the space weather satellite instrument to monitor the sun's coronagraph, oh, sorry, Corona. So the compact Coronagraph instrument.
CCOR one is new to this particular goes satellite, so goes u or goes 19. You know what, this, I, I think this may be a bit like the Esri ESRI thing. I wonder if they don't say GOES. Properly. I, I'm, I'm just, I'm, I'm just, I don't know if anyone from Noah is listening, please let us know because we're, I, I also am insanely curious. If we wanted to time, we could go to YouTube, watch one of videos. Yeah. I've listen to somebody talk about it.
So, look, I, I've always said it that way and I've always been like, is that how you say it? And it comes up infrequently where I have to say it. So more often I have to write it or whatever. So. Anyway. Sometimes I think about it when I talk, but I just think GOES sounds cool. I always say GOES I say, you know, go is and then also go is 19 and go is 18, goes west together Are, you know, they said they're watching over half the globe.
So I always, it always makes me think of a very famous well, reasonably famous Monty Python skit. So I'll let you. Leave it to yourself to go find it, but we're getting a round of applause here from the spacecraft team behind us. As we watch goes, you float into space goes they says, they say goes. So NASA says, goes. On the launch and the first sentence of this little, this little audio playback was, here it goes. So it's like, is that it? But they said it goes so sorry that I say it goes.
But anyway, we now have definitive information. It goes west. Yep. And it's a satellite. So anyway. Okay. Next up news, ArcGIS maps, S-K-S-D-K 2.0 for Unity has been announced. It should be out in the wild, I think. Add some new features. Some of them pretty cool. Some of them are. Yeah, you should be, but whatever. So there's 3D tiles. Better authentication enhancements, that's the Okay. Whatever. Yeah, sure. But. At no point is authentication enhancements ever gonna be sexy or fun.
It's just something that you need. That's just how it is. This is the one that I actually really like is the better control over horizontal ver vertical coordinate systems. So you're have a, you'll have an easier time getting things actually placed within a scene where you think it ought to be, as opposed to what Uni Unity occasionally does is here-ish. Which in geography here-ish is nice, but. Sometimes you need to be a little less ishy than Unity sometimes does.
It's just my been my personal experience. There's a bunch of other stuff in there. Go check it out if you're using the Unity SDK at all there's some cool enhancements there for you. Yeah, I was excited about the multiple maps, which you can do side by side, but they said they still do not relate to each other, so you can compare and contrast, but they're still not aware of each other.
I should point out for like a lot of these updates make sure you're updated to the latest version of one point X, which I think is 1.7. If you wanna move your, your projects into 2.0. If you jump from like an earlier version to 2.0, it things break. I don't even know if it'll let you do it, but if it does, things go wonky. Make sure you updated your project to the latest one before you updated to 2.0. I would also add, I, I stepped away from using this because of just some of the.
More practical behind the scenes errors that you'd often get with version differences in unity and all that. So I may, I may come back and take a look at the, at the new SDK. Okay. And everything that everyone just said about the arc, G-I-S-S-D-K 2.0 for Unity. Duplicate it, but change the name to Unreal Engine. And that's another news item. Exactly same. If you go over to the, and look at both of the blog posts, it's. Basically identical.
The only difference is that for Unity, you get it from the Unity store and for, you know, unreal Engine, you go to your regular Arc, GIS downloads. So this is gonna be a bit old school and a bit esoteric for the nerds out there. But remember when we were all doing the flash and then silver light and the JavaScript and all that stuff, and.
That happened, like they would do a thing and it would be in all versions, but kind of, but not entirely because Silver light flash and JavaScript are all radically different. It's like this, it's, that's now, but 3D in engines, the difference is, is that these new engines are more alike than silver, light and Flash and JavaScript, particularly JavaScript was always the weird one. And it. They can keep all the functions actually happening.
And finally, in the news this week just a, a heads up, for those of you who use QGIS, QGIS 4.0 is now on the roadmap. It is going to basically be switching from QT 5.15, I think whatever the current version of 3.4 QJS. Is using, which is the LTR 3.40. I think current main release is 3.42, which is gonna go through 3.44 if you're keeping track later this summer. And then 4.0 will be in theory, released in October, but the LTR is gonna stay as 3.4 until 4.2. Which will be in February.
So if you are somebody who is using this for day-to-day work, doesn't really matter. 3.4 is the place you wanna be and place you wanna stay for a little while. 'cause of course you don't wanna jump onto a new version just as it's coming out. But it's something that you can look at now if you wanna see either even actually doing builds of at least the windows. Version that's using QT four on 3.4 point, sorry, 3.42. So you can go and download that and see what the QT six gonna is gonna look like.
But it's just more to let you know that changes are afoot. And if you wanna play with it, this I think is important. It's just not exactly buried, but it may not pop out at you necessarily. Is a deprecated. APIs are gonna be retained in 4.0 to ease the transition. 4.2, I'll bet dollars of donuts that won't be true. But it's to help developers go, oh, okay, how do we move this stuff, plugins and all that sort of stuff to the new underlying engines and whatnot.
Yeah, and as always, I have the caveat, you know, check the, the plugin compatibilities. I. And this week's topic this is something that came from Reddit. There is a relatively active, you know, subreddit called slash gis, r slash gis. If you don't use Reddit, they had these sub. Areas where you can focus on a particular area of interest or, or, or conversation topic or that sort of thing. GISI find kind of interesting to look at on a regular basis.
If you're a Reddit user, I suggest maybe subscribe and, and look at a lot of times you get very good information from there. A lot of very good questions around there. For you faculty or graduate students who may be teaching classes? Yes. Your student's final project will be asked, how do I do an X or a Y or Z? That will be a question on here pretty much this time of year. This is April by the way.
However, there was a neat question that I kind of thought was fun to think about, which is what do you wish that the ARC suite of products did that it doesn't do right now? And I thought that'd be a fun little topic in the subreddit centered around complaints about. Annoying things that that arc, GIS Pro for the most part does. But I wanted to broaden a little bit bigger to the bigger suite of RGS online, RGS Pro Enterprise all the different things we get to use now within the.
Ecosystem such as to get us started. Oh, as an example. So this is kind of a weird thing, but I like that we have so many different products that we have access to in the ecosystem. I also find that infuriating because there are so many things if you go to RGS online, particularly if you're at a higher education institution, in a higher education institution. If you've got a site license, they give you access to so much of Esri's product. It, it's very impressive. It's amazing. It's wonderful.
'cause we can teach so many things using all this stuff, however. There are a lot of things out there and it seems to be such a shifting landscape constantly. So if you get a little what's the, I always forget the name of the dots. There's actual name for that interactive Chevron, or No, that's not right. I can't remember what the dots are, but if you go to those dots and, and click on it, if you're at an institution, you're gonna see a big list of products that are out there.
It's really cool that they're all out there, but I don't have the time to figure them all out and figure out. How this particular tool fits within my workflow and how it can help my workflow. The net result is more often than not, I go, that's neat, and then I just do the things I'm used to doing, which that's maddening. I wish there was a better way for rcs online to come up with a new product and help me understand how to make, use this product in what I need to do.
Well, I mean, there's the, the fact that many of these products are not new products. They're just being brought over from the desktop version. So, so there's some of that. So they're not necessarily new, but Yes. Other than the, this is what's new in marches or June or Novembers. Arc Gs online updates. You don't know which ones were the ones that were there.
And trying to remember all the ones each time that is updated roughly quarterly is, you know, not for those of us whose memories are not as good anymore. Well, and I agree, it is a follow on to that too in, in teaching it. So I think some of this will be because we're all educators, like the, the things that, that we will find frustrating stuff may not be those who have. Professional workflows, right?
But in any event, one of the things that is most difficult to to teach to students right, is how do I know? What question to ask to find the tool kind of thing. Like, and so like a lot of times when I do spatial analysis, it's about here's the questions you're asking. And so you have to think of the result, and this is a tool that might get you there. But we've maintained through all of the versions, right, the way tools are organized in the toolbox and stuff, and some of that.
Is reasonably intuitive, data management, whatever. But sometimes you find you know, especially with the newer types, you can search them by name, but if you don't know what it is, like what the name is, right it becomes difficult to to kind of guess through it because there's always gonna be a key word that's gonna be in there. But in any event, I mean maybe there's not really a solution to it. 'cause again, this is more a logistic organization of the software kind of thing. But just to.
A different way maybe to envision how the things that the GIS can do on the analysis side are either grouped or named or again, 'cause some of them obvious, some of them less so, I think, I think we're, we're, I think we're the problem about this maybe, and maybe that's it. I, I, I go through, I look at these things. I look for these things that I know exist or that I am aware I. That exists through various research.
The students who are doing best right now for me are the ones who are going to Claude or chat GBT or whatever they're using and saying, how do I do this? And it gives them the tools that they need to find in ArcGIS and how to do it. Now, Esri's been talking about integrating these type of search features into ARC GS online, into Arc GS Pro. They're not quite there yet. But you know, I expect we'll see them from Esri at some point in time themselves.
But until then, you know, it's, it's less about knowing the tools and beginning to know how to find the tools. And that's been us as well. I mean, as all of this went from hard copies when we were first starting to being online, I mean, we spent a lot more time looking for tools. And how to do these things using online tools.
And it's just shifting now from understanding how to search on Reddit or Substack or I dunno, whatever tool you're used to using to now shifting to letting the LLMs, you know, be the house for that information and letting the gpt pull that information out for us. Instead of having to search it out ourselves anymore. So I think, you know, we as the old. Are somewhat the problem in this particular stack of issues more than anything else? Yeah, I wouldn't, I wouldn't disagree with that.
I, I mean, my, my favorite one that the, the, I will say this, right, that the students cannot grasp why it's called this AL Stats. It's just like, it's just like those two words together, and I will tell them down like it's rare to have to, to use it, but that's one that, I mean, we get what it means and all that, but like. So, so, yeah. I mean, I, I don't think you're wrong, right? Because that's, that's how we would do it, right?
We either would learn it from somebody else in our lab back in the day when we were old. Or yes, we'd go to a forum. So I'm with Jesse that I'm another person that encourages and uses myself the large language models to find, you know, what are other TER terms that might be used to describe this, to figure out in ESRI, what to look for. And also to fill in the blanks with any sort of directions on how to do something and have found it, you know, very useful.
And almost it's like a side by side along with. Using any SRI product. I mean, for me, the source of this complaint is the consolidations and moving this there and then getting rid of that and all this other stuff like that. And I feel like, you know, I just went to the Chevron right now just to see what the heck is there. And there's stuff there that I'm like, I don't have any clue what Excalibur is. Admittedly, it's in beta, but I'm just like, what in the world is that thing?
And then, so to answer your question, that is the imagery. Backend and is it then. I thought it was outta beta. Is there a non-beta version? Lemme show more and look real quick. ArcGIS Excalibur beta. And then similarly, survey 1, 2, 3 has always bugged the hell out of me because my survey students go, oh, and I, no, it's not that it's so totally different. It's not gonna help you do the thing that you're thinking about. It's for other stuff completely.
But Ezra's always had a naming, you know, issue that goes with it going back years and years and years. So, I mean, there's just stuff in here that just, I. You know, like things get deprecated and if you don't keep up with the show notes, you won't keep up with that. I Is Experience Builder Gone now or experience Builder? No. No. Okay. 'cause it's not showing up on my list, for example. Might have to click on show more sometimes. Oh, there it is. I see it. I see. Experience Vault.
Yeah. But so, but it's no one near Instant Apps App Studio. Yeah, we just did, yeah, we just, I still have App Studio installed. Right. Installed. So. Because it's somewhat, it's basically alphabetical experience builder and in Synapse in my head are, you know, conjoined, you know, one's a deeper version of the other in a lot of ways, but they're nowhere near each other spatially on the list of icons. So it's like, okay, where the hell is this thing?
That little stuff like that, you know, it's just always kind of, I feel like there's a better way to cohesively get linked things together. Than alphabetically. I, I will say that some of us, like weirdos like me, go through and rearrange based on. Which ones we use more. So, I mean, story maps is usually buried at the bottom. So every time I help a student, I'm like, I have no idea where it is.
'cause I put it at the very top because I know I'm gonna have to use it every semester to help students and, and give them answers. So how do you rearrange 'em? Oh, just used to be just drag, but. It didn't just work whenever I just tried it, so I don't know. Yeah, it, it is, you just, you do just drag it. It's just a little, but weirdly enough story maps is the top of mine and I, and I don't remember ever doing that. Anyway, that was mine.
So I'm gonna follow on with, with mine, which I, I guess it's interestingly sort of my things that now, because there's just so many functions and tools and things that are, here is a lot of mine that are wishlist. Things are more. To smooth the process of actually using it, especially again in the education setting. So here's one thing, and this is, this probably isn't something that's just ARC GS online.
It's probably any software that requires an always on connection to the internet and to go back and forth for remote processes. And that is some better way to tell the impact of the he and maybe it's impossible to do to tell the impact of the health of your connection. On the timing of your tool use. Right? So how long it's gonna take and will it potentially compromise the results coming back? Right?
So like a, a, a sort of live little thing there going, you know, right now the internet connection is not supporting this tool and it's gonna take and so a better way to do that rather than watch it spin and this is it, right? We used to not care if we would run a buffer and it would take eight hours right? Back in the day. Us old to be like, yeah, I would just go. Go get supper and come back and see what happens. But now if it takes more than three minutes, you're like, what's wrong?
And it increasingly at certain times of the day or whatever, right, people's internet connections and it will affect some of the tools, whether it is in Rrc, TIS Pro and you're running it, or whether it's Arc just online. And so what I would like to see as a wishlist, and again, this may not be something Frank as a web person will know, this may not be something that's doable, but just a way to. To see whether or not maybe you should just wait and do it later.
It's also a question of server load. So Dr. Bergon has classes that are dead in the middle of the peak time for not just the East coast, but also the West coast. Whereas I have classes that are in the morning, it's generally before West Coast is online. And so I don't, I don't see a lot of the same slowdowns that she complains about Whenever she has the same, she uses some of the same exercises and so yeah, it's, it's. Not just connection health, but also, you know, server load.
And it's hard to to see that because as we know, not all the servers are ESRI servers. So. And given how it's distributed Yeah. Mean that even care whose problem it is. I would just like to know that. Yep. We already know that this is gonna be a problem. That's, that's my wish. And maybe it's, again, I don't, I don't do web stuff, so maybe it's not even something you can do, but I wish, well it did.
It doesn't help that Esri has been addicted for over two decades to a hundred percent for five minutes. I mean, it'll get to a hundred percent and then it'll just continue to do stuff, and you're like, by definition, that's not a hundred percent done. It just isn't. It isn't because math, math works that way. Stick it 98% for the next hour and a half, and I'd be fine. It's the a hundred percent and then it just sit there and spins. Sorry.
So don't tell me a hundred percent until you've actually written the file. If. If it's not done, it's not a hundred percent. Well, the analysis is done, but now it's gotta get out of memory and onto a, I didn't ask, I didn't ask for a i what I want. Basically, if you go, when's dinner ready? It's, it's a hundred percent done. When can I eat two hours from now? It's not a hundred percent done. It's, it's, I need to know it.
Sorry. It's, it's definitely something I get very passionate and angry about, but. To answer your question. So it is a hard problem because it is going to be a function of the two things you identified or the Jesse included in there. One is server load and one is network latency, right? So network latency changes literally by the second, and that's hard to guess, but they really should have a pretty good estimation of how much server load this is gonna be.
And even if they have like really rough estimates like quick. Takes a minute, little longer, you know, go, go get a cup of coffee, you know, that give you those rough buckets on server load. You go, oh, okay. This is a very intensive thing to do on the other end. And so network latency is just gonna make that worse. So you know that, okay, I'm looking at something that's gonna take a while versus something that's should happen very quickly. That would be, I think, a, an upgrade.
And you should be able to do that again, just based upon estimated server load. Which, you know, they can do that type of stuff because they've got that stupid credit. As I say, stupid, I know a lot of people have asked for it. But credit estimator in there that they go, we're gonna estimate the credits. Like, well, you can do the math then to figure out. So credit and time estimate. Yeah, I mean, you could do an estimate.
I'm okay with it, you know, if you said it's gonna take five minutes and it takes. Five minutes and 27 seconds. I'm not gonna flip. I don't think anyone would flip out. They go, okay, fine. I have some idea how long it's gonna take. I know it's gonna take more than 20 seconds. Yeah. Yes. Yeah. That, that's really all I need. Or, yeah, like a dashboard. Right? So if you, if the network traffic now suggests that it's only gonna be like 30 seconds, it's green. If it's yellow, right.
And if it's red, like, not to say that don't do it perceptive, but hey, this is gonna take a while, so don't panic. Because in the education situation, a lot of times we'll get, if students are used to tools lasting. 15 or 20 seconds. If they start to go longer, not only will they ask the inst me, the instructor and I'm like, well, I don't know. Just let it run. But they cannot just let it run. Hundred percent. That is not in their mindset. They will say, will stop it.
They will do something and then they'll go, I don't understand why it didn't work. And I'm like, what didn't work? Because it's gone already. Well, well, you know, I mean it that what makes this even harder to do for. Product. So an awful lot of the things, an awful lot of the algorithms that underpin a lot of the stuff are just using a mathematical formula and they really haven't changed how they've done it.
They may have updated the, the programming language, but they really haven't changed how they're functioning in many, if not most cases. When you've got something like an imagery data set where you're gonna do something on a pixel by pixel basis, that's the clearest example I can think of. But it may go, okay, I know this pixel is probably gonna take between X number of seconds and y number of seconds, or milliseconds, whatever it may be. And I. Two things that happens.
It may not actually go through 'cause it may work sequentially and just go, I'm start at the first at zero zero, work my way to the end and not actually done the quick analysis to say, well how many pixels are we talking about here? So that it may not do that. So it may actually not know how long it's gonna take because it didn't look at the scope of the project to start with.
'cause the algorithm never had to do that because 25 years ago, like you said, look, it's gonna take hours, you know that just go get dinner and let me worry about it. So. It's gonna take me an hour to figure out how many pixels we're talking about here to do the scope of the project. Now, on top of that, it probably hits certain pixels where it goes, oh, this is a problem.
I'm oversimplifying it, but you can imagine for any particular task, how that would be a really hard thing to do, given that it's using legacy code. I bet if they updated a lot of that stuff to say, well, let's start with a process that does an estimate and then actually do it because we have the computing power to reasonably do that now. It would be be, it would have an easier time telling you how long it's gonna take and, and there's just no money in that.
'cause you're not gonna pay extra for that. Right. Yeah. Like if. If you were buying it, if, you know, we all, yeah, we all get it because of higher education, but if you were buying, it wouldn't say like, for an extra thousand dollars, I can give you an estimation how long it's gonna take. And you go, nah, that's good. Or your, or your business people, your an, your boss will go, nah, we're good. So that was mine. Barb, what's yours?
Mine is the, the co-working and collaboration that that still feels like there's not a good way to do work together. Or to share things with people so they can make comments. Especially if you're working with, you know, participatory GIS that, you know, you go to things like Zoom and teams or, you know, other ways of, of getting that feedback. But I, I think, you know, there can be a better way to do that. And this might be human error on my part.
There might be, you know, a way to do it or way other people do it. That's just. Works well. But so far I haven't found a good way to, to do that. And there is so much, you know, to share. 'cause that's a lot of what we're doing. Well, I mean, you have, you have sketch layers and things like that, but those aren't necessarily getting those deeper qualitative conversations. And that's part of the problem too, right?
Is that there are, Esri continues to dip their toes into the qualitative side of things. But it's, it's hard to, I think. See them making that leap into looking at how qualitative and mapping works together because it's just so far outside of the normal day to day. Use cases for Arc GIS and I think it, they found a tool that they really, really, really, really, really like, which is story maps.
And they go, well, that just use that, that do, do all the quality That all it, it all, that's telling the story. But it doesn't, yeah. I mean it's not about ingestion. Right. And, and I think that they haven't really gone Okay, we made something that is pretty amazing. I, I mean, I love story maps. It's wonderful. I love the new version of story maps, but they haven't gone well that. That suggests approach to thinking about space.
How could we backwards put that into, you know, more of our products? They just feel like they haven't, if they have taken that step, it's definitely not really apparent in the products. Well, even so in if you're working in the online environment, right, there's groups, but even there it's pretty minimal, right? Because you can share items and you can share editing, but it's not truly.
Collaborative in, in the sense that, that you're talking about Barb, which I, you know, I mean, I think way back when I can remember some of us, and I think I might even, this is a long time ago. It was like messing with a, a chat program. Like again, this is still pretty basic. This isn't what other things are capable of. A little chat program that you could run live so that you could talk about tools and stuff while you were running analyses.
But even then, right, you would talk about, well, I'm sitting here. In my arc map and I'm running this, you know, spatial analyst tool and you can, you know, see it when I've done kinda thing when I send it to you. So even that wasn't what we're talking about. But, but yeah, I would agree that would be kind of, I, I'm not, I'm not sure how I would envision it, but, well, I can tell you how they envisioned it, how they would envision it.
Yeah. They envisioned survey 1, 2, 3 field maps, various mobile tools because they expected the. The, the non-professional to be using, not the professional tools. So they didn't expect the people who would be working with us necessarily in these environments to have access to ArcGIS Pro. You know, back in the day it was Arc Reader, or arc, what was the Globe version? I can't remember.
It might have been a just different version of 3D version of reader, but you know, they, they expected them to look at. These materials are now explore. Explore. Yeah, explore. There you go. And now of course they, they expect us to publish a map and, and share that and create an experience that allows them to do some sort of response to that or to be using one of the mobile apps. And so it's, it's disconnected from the interface that we think about because I don't think that they think.
That is the interface that we want people working with. You have I, I think that they're preoccupied with the word workflow which has become a very dominant term in particularly enterprise. But any software I. Realm. So it's not like it's unique to Esri. Everyone's obsessed with the word workflow and I think that they, they envision a lot of their tools going, you do this, and then you do that and you do the other thing.
And some of that is, these people over here do it, or these people over there do it. And some of what Barbara's talking about is a little, arguably a little more developed in academia because we do that kind of inherently with multi-author, you know, journal articles and things like that. But. The idea of that, it's not so much a flow there, there's, it's like a. And Eddie of, of iveness that goes on, and that allows you to kind of spin off new ideas and that that piece leads to workflows.
So I kind of feel like they've created a set of tools that are designed to help you come up with workflows once you know exactly. Where you're starting and where you end. But they haven't quite figured out how to make this in the, okay, but before we decide what the workflow is, how can the tools help us do that part as well? So if we go back to the curve that takes us from. Experience to publication, and we're more in the middle of that than on either end with the nevermind.
No, I, I was gonna say, right, so I was gonna use the iceberg that, you know, I, I feel like we need to reveal more of what's being done behind the scenes earlier. Because we complain that, well, they didn't think to integrate us into this, this project, but they don't really understand what we do. And I think some of it's, they need to touch experience and, and see what we do, you know, alongside us. But that's a longstanding thing, right?
Experts sit in your cubicle with your advanced software and no one knows what it does, and then you just spit out a result. And then it's still more prevalent maybe than people think. Yeah. So what the abstract is, is that yes, it's, it's still something that's not. You, you can build these things in that Barb would like to see, but they, a lot of it, it would be actually building from scratch and then linking into to the traditional Arch Gs align or other things.
I. To get beyond what they have built into Survey 1, 2, 3, or Experience Builder or those type of things were, what happened to that? What is it was maps or office or whatever. Yeah, it elements, it's of that connected to like teams and stuff. It's, it was recently updated, I'm thinking in the last couple of weeks to ARC and it's, it's now called Arc, GIS for Microsoft. I think. Oh yeah, well there you go. Well, that then, not entirely. Not entirely.
'cause there is RTS for Power bi, which is Microsoft, so it, it's still a little. More murky than more than one tool. Yeah. There's, and there's, and there is actually, you can get Rgi IS for Excel. Like if you, I'm like, I have no interest in doing this whatsoever in Word and PowerPoint. You can just get the Excel version, which I think is really bizarre. But, because I would think you would hook it into Office 365 as part of Microsoft. But what do I know?
And, and let's not even get into the Rgi IS for, adobe Adobe's. Yeah. Adobe Cloud stuff. Okay. We won't Well you, you know why we won't is because I don't have it. I mean I have that, but I don't have any of the Adobe Cloud stuff. Okay. So I don't really even know. Sorry. Alright. It's, so whenever, so going back to our news item, and so maybe this will be mine. Whenever we look at ArcGIS four.
Whether it's Unity, unreal Engine Microsoft, Adobe, whatever tools that they are linking into it, it's a, a limited set of tools. And I think we talked about this many years ago, whenever they first started rolling these out for Adobe and, and Microsoft or back then office of just how frustrating it was to be limited by that. Whenever you're, you're talking to students and you wanna be able to talk about the full capabilities.
And it's just kind of this cardiographic veneer that's a little bit better than, of course excels by default. But it's not what you could do if you were just, you know, generating something and then bringing it out and then opening it completely as that next document in Illustrator or Photoshop or whatever you're gonna do, as opposed to using that little, that little tool. Quote unquote from my perspective to, to just play around with it. I don't know.
It's just, I, I think we're, and I think we said this back in the day, that we weren't the audience for those things because they, they limited what we knew we could do. Just like, you know, the s for Unity ArcGIS on Unreal Engine they, they are great tools. If you want to basically create a GIS in a 3D world, but if you want to create a 3D world that uses GIS data, it's not, it's not what we need. Yes. I've had to jettison it every time I've tried to do that. Yeah. So they're great.
They work for a lot of people, usually not for us. Well, and I don't wanna complain about the flip side of that, which I find I'm finding frustrating. Is that the existence of those. Implies to an awful lot of users. That's the extent of GIS and, and it's, it's very frustrating to say, well, I can do that in Excel with the, the Arc thing. I'm like, you can do a baby version of that. Sure. But much you can make a map so much. You can make a map in Python, you can make a map in, shoot you.
Yeah, I mean, there's our, I mean, we have arguments of whether or not we should be making maps in Arc, GIS Pro or whatever, because it, it just kind of gets you 90% of the way there, but you just want that little bit extra that you can do to make it just a little bit better. And most of us don't take the time to do that. And of course, if you're new into the environment and just have this thing that needs to get done, you don't have time to do that extra 10%.
But if you do, that's when we see the things that are in the annual atlas of design or the the map gallery at the Esri. You see, or you know, all these things that are just amazing maps. Take that one step past what? It does by itself a lot of times for any new tools.
Yeah. And a lot of times E even even ignoring that bit is what I'm finding frustrating is that because you can produce a product that you never could produce in Excel using RJIS for Excel, what I'm finding is people who are non mapping experts are saying, look, I can just make a map. To which they, and then become unresponsive to me saying, yeah, but if you would collect your data at a little finer scale, which you should be able to do without any extra problem, you could do so many more things.
And they go, oh, no, but I, I can make the map, so I, I just need state. But even if you've got county or address, we could do so much more, eh. But you're already collecting that information. Why don't you just transfer it over to here? Anyway, those type of things happen when non-experts. Feel like they can do the exact same product. It's I, to me it's a little bit like the Walmart effect. Like, oh, I can get one. There's a Walmart. Well, you can, but not really.
I mean, a lot of times the much better version is a much better version for a lot of reasons. It, it's just that I find very frustrating about those tools. It's great for those users, but. I don't know that Esri does a great job of saying there's a lot more back here that you could be doing, by the way, which would help them sell products. So I don't really know exactly why they don't do a better job of that.
I always thought, and I would just only say this one, I always thought it almost ironic that very often though, to even know. That you would like to add on and make a map, you would need somebody who does in fact understand GIS to point out that, or something to point out that you could make a map and then to go looking for a restricted tool like that. So if that makes sense, like it's the irony of it is at that point, then go get the GIS person to hook you up. Yeah. I don't know.
I've always found them weird and we're picking on Esri because that's Yeah. Where Frank started the conversation, but yeah, but I mean it's keep mind. Yeah. This is every GIS product, open source, and proprietary. Out there because it's just impossible for anyone to build every tool that everyone else needs. To work exactly like we want it in this situation because it changes all the time. And a lot of times the solution is your own custom mix.
Yeah. And, and I think that gets back too, is, you know, to the, the heart of GIS, which isn't just the tool, it's the people. And you know, a lot of times this is the, the question of what are we doing to educate people about what we do and what is, what is GIS beyond the tool? And, you know, I don't know if that there's. Anyone that can address that. But I think, you know, ESRI is so large and, and so prevalent everywhere that they might be one of the people that can within their universe.
Problem is they're a juggernaut, right? Mm-hmm. So many different tools, so many different potential use cases. It's, you know, I'm unintentionally dodging somebody. To do an interview because we've been, we've all had Kohls recently. And, and, and so eventually I'll feel, I, I already feel bad that I haven't reached back out to him, but his use case is very specific, so he has an audience that he can grow.
But whenever you're something like Hexagon and Esri, you know Adobe outside of the, the geospatial space. Autodesk, how do you bring in focus new groups? Because, you know, you are so huge and each of the different teams have their own spin on marketing, but it's just, you're already the thing that everybody's kind of like, well, it can probably do part of this. So how do you then, but that's for the marketing depart departments to figure out Yeah.
How I, I have like a, I have like a half a dozen of like little things. They're just, we're, we're near the end here, so I won't bring them up. They're little. Things that are specifically picking on Esri, for example publishing an ARC Jazz Pro to ARC J online if you need to update data, it's still more of a pain in the neck than I really think it ought to be.
But little things like that, that's just so, there's plenty of stuff you can pick on, but I did, I, I like the way this conversation went and went with bigger swings of, you know, how can we think about this a little? Better thinking about this in, you know, we like to talk about Web 2.0, Web3 0.0, web 4.0, whatever it may be.
But, you know, if, if the enterprise level software service is sort of GISI don't know what 5.0 at this point you know, how do we tighten all this up a little bit and move into like a next, the sort of next generation of some of these tools to get it out of the GIS nerd. Escape a little bit more, and of course, just to pile on at the very end. You know what? I know I can go into every layer and set it so that it can auto assign the IDs.
I don't want to, before I, before I have to make a new story map or export this one layer. Why? Why, why? Why do I have to write it? Click every time. And say Yes, go ahead and auto sign it. I don't care. I mean, come on, just do it. Leave me out of it. Just, and here's another thing. I'm publishing a web map and it goes, Hey, by the way, this thing is not in the same projection as the map. Well just do that then just do it. I don't, don't make me go do that. Don't.
And it's gotten better because now you can go, Hey, you know that's not the same projection. You want me to do that? You go, yeah, why do I have to get involved? Just. Anyway, just one button. Do you want me to fix all the issues? Yes, yes. Just yes. And I, this year am introducing a whole new generation of students to 9 9 9 9 9. Why, why still? You can delete that if you want. I don't, I don't, I don't get those. I don't, this is it.
I have not, for like three years straight did not get a single one. And now this spring I've seen it a dozen times. Something went wrong. Yeah, and it's like. Don't know what it is and but now this, this group though, this crew is like, I don't believe you that there's nothing you could do. And I'm like, literally it says it's unexpected and there is nothing I can look up to specifically figure out what triggered that one. You could do it again. And he did. And it came up again.
I'm like, you see, so here's that is something that's hard to explain to, I guess you missed the step somewhere I'm saying. Yeah, you mess it up, go back and fix up or do something wrong. But either way, it's telling you to stop it. Here's another thing, in either pro or online, if I go searching for data, don't give me a finished map. I don't care. I, I don't, I don't need their map. I'm clearly looking for data. Well, then you need to click on layer or not.
Well, but it, and, and if you, you know, it just shows you everything. And I'm like, alright, I gotta click on the thing with the living atlas. And then, and so now we'll stop. Yeah. Yeah. And go on to the events corner. As always, if you'd like us to add No, wait, go to events, maybe. Yes. So Machine Learning for Earth Observation Conference is taking place June 18th through 20th and Exeter.
And the 15th European conference on Precision agriculture will be the 29th of June through July 3rd in Barcelona, Spain. Of course. If you'd like us to add your event to the podcast, send us an email to podcast to pray spatial.com. If you'd like to reach us individually, I can be reached at sue@veryspatial.com. I can be reached at barb bit very spatial.com.
I can reached atFrank@veryspatial.com and most of the social medias that are worth all while at NoJa par, I'm available at kind of spatial and of course, if you like to find our contact information, head of dari spatial.com/contacts. As always. We're the folks from Very spacial. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you in a couple weeks. You.