» esri Mapkist

Customizing Your Legend in ArcMap

Aug 13, 2010 @ 11:11 AM by Kumiko Yamazaki -- cartography esri

Here’s a new tip for ArcMap I didn’t know about - the ESRI Mapping Center provides a detailed tutorial on customizing your legend patch shapes: Mapping Center : New Legend Patch Shapes.

What am I even talking about? It’s the ability to turn your plain ol’ legend into something spiffy like this:

The shapes shown in the new legend are a smaller representation of an urban area or lake actually shown on the map. The process is not as automated as I’d like, as there are quite a few steps involved.

If the above tutorial is too much work, you can also choose a pre-defined patch shape rather than the dull rectangle.

Yet another alternative is to, you know, just export to Illustrator. Isn’t that what all cartographers do anyway?

What can ArcGIS.com and ArcGIS iOS do for me?

Jul 6, 2010 @ 9:58 AM by Kumiko Yamazaki -- esri gis ipad iphone

In recent weeks, ESRI has revealed ArcGIS.com, ArcGIS Explorer Online, a new logo, and now an iPhone/iPad app, all in time for next week’s mega User Conference in San Diego.

Naturally, I was curious to see what it can do for me. I have ArcView on my computer but it’s installed on Vista via Boot Camp on my Mac. It’s not ideal and is a pain having to restart the machine in order to switch operating systems. So how can ArcGIS.com help me, the lazy Mac user?

It can’t.

I had a CSV file of local brewpubs I wanted to plot (yummy!), and ArcGIS.com won’t accept it. A CSV file.. one of the simplest, most common file formats EVER. Instead, it only supports:

“ArcGIS map files (mxd, nmf, 3dd, sxd, ncfg, mpk, wmpk and pmf), ArcGIS layer files (lyr, lpk, and nmc), and ArcGIS tools (eaz, and esriaddin).”

Wrong wrong wrong. ArcGIS.com is hardly useful for the average user who doesn’t already have access to pricey ESRI products. I’m not sure what I was expecting, but the potential was there and ESRI screwed it up.

This is all unfortunate considering they had the resources to develop a tremendous product that runs seamlessly across the web and mobile applications, and the ability to create and share the results. Their free app, especially the iPad app, is beautiful. You can browse through everyone’s maps or simply log into your account and bring up your own.

ESRI users are undoubtedly excited over these new developments but the rest of the world, which happens to be quite large, has been shafted.