ESRI User Conference: Monday
After getting in just in time to see Jack Dangermond give the opening session, I sat down to a long morning of underwhelming product demos and much banter of the likes of “we are changing the world”, where everyone gives them a nice pat on the back and feels all nice and fuzzy.
In the afternoon, I was impressed by the upcoming addition in ArcSDE 9.1 of history tables in addition to the adds and deletes tables. This will give us the ability to have time-sensitive versions, much like I have been trying to implement (unsuccessfully, I might add) at work. Whether or not the actual in-the-field implementation actually works is yet to be seen, but the feauture looks promising.
Finally, them map gallery brought some refreshments and hundreds of maps. I joked that ESRI should develop a map beautification button that turns the crappy, poor colors, comic sans fonts, no legends, map titles or descriptive text maps into winners. It’s also funny that some of these same maps thought it necessary to enter themselves in the Best Cartography contest that goes on in the map gallery. The software might get better in the next years, but the fact is that most people never get beyond the defaults of the software. This is as clear as ever when it comes to the map gallery, where I can tell by the map which software product was used to draw it with.