Latest Contributions by XiChen

ArcGIS Earth continues to evolve, bringing exciting new capabilities to its users. In this blog, we dive into the latest features and enhancements in ArcGIS Earth Desktop 2.1, and ArcGIS Earth Mobile 2.0, both released in December 2023. These updates offer enhanced functionality, improved user experience, and new tools to facilitate better geospatial analysis and visualization. What's New in ArcGIS Earth Desktop 2.1 ArcGIS Earth Updater: The new version notifies users about available updates, streamlining the process of downloading and installing new features, enhancements, and security updates. Workspace Management Updates: Enhanced workspace management allows users to organize and manage projects more effectively. It includes options like Open, Save as, Import, Export, and Clear. Label KML Lines and Polygons: Improved support for KML labels now includes lines and polygons, providing more flexibility in labeling without needing separate placemark layers. KML Enhancements: This update brings several improvements to KML handling, including layer highlights, visual status indicators for overlays, additional KML icon support, respect for level of detail in KML regions, pop-up behavior control, custom background colors, support for physical units in gx:physicalWidth, and complex snippet styles. Navigation Enhancements: New settings include options to disable the default fly-to angle and to adjust on-screen navigator options (Default, Collapsed, Expanded). Support for Location Unit Input: The application now supports Degree Decimal Minutes coordinates and negative latitude and longitude coordinates. Reorder and Rename Geopackage and Mobile Geodatabase Sublayers: Users can now rename and reorder layers within a mobile geodatabase or geopackage, with changes recorded within the active workspace. Scene Layer Elevation Offset: Adjust the elevation offset of 3D point scene layers in Absolute mode, plus a fix for 3D object scene layers in drape mode. Time-enabled Data: Enhancements to the time slider and playback animation of time-enabled data improve the handling of temporal data. Layout Improvements: Export layout feature now includes undo/redo and copy/paste hotkeys, and a better user experience when adding text boxes and legend elements. Export Elevation Profiles as CSV: Users can now export elevation profiles as .csv files for detailed line analysis​​. What's New in ArcGIS Earth Mobile 2.0 UI Redesign: The mobile app boasts a redesigned user interface, including a new toolbox and a refreshed look for the Table of Contents.                          Underground Mode: This mode enables users to view underground data with adjustable surface transparency.                                                                          Draw Tool: Enhanced drawing capabilities allow for the creation of point, line, and polygon drawings with different styles. These can be edited and shared as .kml/.kmz files. Enhanced Tour Experience: Users can create tours from geotagged pictures or locations, with improved editing options for waypoints, camera views, and captions. Improved Geosearch: The Search tool has been redesigned for quicker browsing between results and a new feature to copy coordinates.                                                 ArcGIS Earth's latest versions bring significant improvements and new functionalities, enhancing the user experience and broadening the scope of 3D spatial analysis. Download ArcGIS Earth Desktop 2.1 and ArcGIS Earth Mobile 2.0 today to explore these new features! As we step into the new year, we wish all our readers and users a very Happy New Year filled with exciting discoveries and advancements in the world of GIS! ... View more

We're excited to introduce our Early Adopter Community for ArcGIS Earth Mobile. This is a unique opportunity for our dedicated users, partners, and customers to experience the initial stages of ArcGIS Earth Mobile's evolution. By participating, you'll get a firsthand look at new features, test them out, and have the chance to provide feedback that can directly influence the product's final design. If you've previously explored the 3D mapping capabilities of ArcGIS Earth, your insights and experiences are invaluable to us. We believe that your feedback can help us refine and enhance the mobile version to better suit user needs. Ready to be a part of this collaborative journey? Reach out to an Esri representative or sign up here. Thank you for your continued support and enthusiasm! The ArcGIS Earth Mobile Team ... View more

The August release of ArcGIS Earth desktop is now available! Download this latest release of ArcGIS Earth on our website, and visit the ArcGIS Earth Resources page for free training materials and tutorials.  This latest release comes with several new features, enhancements, and bug fixes, including the ability to filter for layers, draw templates, and add drawings for the Automation API.   What's New   Filter for Layer - Filter is a key new feature we added to this release. You can define a single expression or a combination of expressions as a filter to determine a desired subset of features shown on the map. The filter panel can be accessed through the attribute table’s filter icon or layers’ right-click menu. By applying definition queries to the layers, you can filter out the data you don’t need and only have the desired data display on the globe.  Draw Templates - Various KML drawing templates are now available to draw lines or polygons in free shapes or predefined shapes. Line templates include the regular line, right angle line, and freehand mode. Polygon templates include rectangle, circle, ellipse, and freehand as well. All of these shapes can be extruded to a proper elevation and configured size, and transparency as needed.     Earth API Add Drawings - New methods of Automation drawing API are added to this release, including Add Drawing, Remove Drawings, and Clear Drawings. With the Automation drawing API, you can add the placemark, path, and polygon in ArcGIS Earth. Clear all graphic is also supported in the new release. As demoed in the below video, we first enable a html window to perform navigation using ArcGIS online geocoding service. Once navigation is complete, we can save the start point and the destination point, including the route as KML data and have them added to Table of Contents automatically. These data can be grouped together and be shared to online or your portal connection all at once.     Enhancements   Disabled basemap - There is a new capability to disable all basemaps added to the new desktop release of ArcGIS Earth. The basemap can now be disabled anytime by clicking the “No Basemap” thumbnail at the end of the basemap gallery. Remember certificates for PKI authentication - Users who utilize PKI authentication for ArcGIS Earth will now have their certificates and credentials saved for future use. This should make user the authentication process more seamless. A new Select a certificate window has been added. A certificate can now be remembered when being selected in the window for the corresponding portal. It can also be conveniently removed by clicking the Forget Certificate option in the portal context menu. Layer properties enhancement - Under the Summary tab in the layer properties window, description, data source, and spatial reference are redesigned. First, image, table, and hyperlinks, as well as various HTML formats including paragraph, list, font size, bold are now honored in the layer description for a portal item or service layer properties. Second, the data path or service URL can now be copied or open in an external browser with one click. Third, spatial reference information is organized and presented in table format and is more readable.  KML “save as” enhancement - The “Save As” panel is redesigned specifically for KML layers to clarify the Save as process. For an edited KML layer, the Save option in the right-click menu is removed and combined with Save as. The original KML data will not be modified only if you check the Replace the layer in table of contents once exported check box to ensure your edits are saved and automatically added to the table of contents to replace the original layer. On the other hand, unchecking this option will perform the common Save as function. Issues addressed   Issue Description ENH-000149122 Provide the ability for the ArcGIS Earth XY Provider search to parse Degrees, Minutes, Seconds (DMS) coordinates in the formats "ddmmssN/SddmmssE/W" or "dddmmssN/SdddmmssE/W". BUG-000149160 The <Document> tag is not present in the KML file created from ArcGIS Earth 1.15. BUG-000143744 ArcGIS Earth does not add a CSV file with DMS values. BUG-000148493 Unable to disable the logs or change the log levels in ArcGIS Earth. BUG-000145543 Refreshing the KML network links in ArcGIS Earth 1.14 collapses the nested folders and layers. BUG-000149776 Intermittent issues with saving descriptions on the Info tab in ArcGIS Earth. Authentication SAML sign in to portal using certificate returns a blank page. This is a known limitation at ArcGIS Earth 1.15, and gets fixed at 1.16.   Known Limitation   Feature Description Symbology Color ramp will not work when the renderer of a feature service layer is visualVariables. ... View more

The April 2022 release of ArcGIS Earth is here! Download this latest release of ArcGIS Earth on our website, and visit the ArcGIS Earth Resources page for free training materials and tutorials.  This latest release comes with several new features, enhancements, and bug fixes, including support for Vector Tile Layers, KML multi-selection and batch editing, attribute tables, an on-screen navigation controller, and 3D labeling.   What's New   Vector tile layer support - Containing vector representations of data across scales, vector tiles adapt to the resolution of their display device and can be restyled. In ArcGIS Earth, you can add a vector tile layer into My Data folder or Startup layer folder, or set it as the basemap. Navigator - Once you enable navigation control in the application settings, the navigator appears in the lower right corner of the viewport. The north compass and home button are also integrated into the navigator with more flexible navigation controls.     3D labeling - You can customize the style and visualization of labels on the fly. With the label editing capability, you can set the label position and label style in a 3D global view. Attribute table - An attribute table displays raw data and allows you to sort, select, and export that data.   KML batch editing - Multiple KML nodes with the same geometry type can now be edited together. You can also batch edit all the layers stored in a folder.     Image display order - A dynamic imagery layer of a mosaic dataset  contains a collection of images. When working with these types of imagery layers in ArcGIS Earth, you can modify the image display order and determine how to resolve overlapping areas.  Enhancements   Automation API auto-start setting - The ArcGIS Earth automation API can now be enabled directly through an autostart switch in the application’s advanced settings. Add Startup layers to My Data - Layer data stored in the Startup layer folder can now be added to the My Data folder with one click from the layer’s context menu. KML multiselection - You can select multiple KML nodes by pressing Ctrl or Shift while selecting the nodes.   Known Limitation   Feature Description Pop-up No context menu for images in pop-ups when the local machine is connected to a virtual machine with a different scale and layout. Attribute table Multipart features are not supported for export in the attribute table. Authentication SAML log into portal using certificate returns blank page. A workaround to this is to sign in using web browser. ... View more

We’re excited to now be rolling out ArcGIS Earth 1.14 on Nov. 18, 2021! Download this latest release of ArcGIS Earth on our website, and visit the ArcGIS Earth Resources page for free training materials and tutorials.  This major release brings support for new data types, huge improvements in imagery rendering, freehand drawing, and a lot more. Please read on!   What's New   New data types include the following: OGC GeoPackage (.gpkg) Mobile map package (.mmpk)  Processing templates - Given that multiple processing templates are predetermined on the server-side of an image service, after adding the data, you can switch from one template to another for a different renderer or raster function chain.  Freehand drawing - Support of freehand mode allows you to create lines and polygons that follow the movement of your pointer. Enable freehand mode by clicking while pressing Alt. Elevation exaggeration - The Elevation Exaggeration user interface has been redesigned to visualize the landscape on the globe. The maximum value is increased to 100 on the scale bar. This maximum value of exaggeration can be configured to 1000 in the ArcGIS Earth configuration file if needed. Enhancements   Pop-up resize - Pop-up size mode can be switched from Fixed to Auto Resizing in the ArcGIS Earth configuration file. Support overall KML layer transparency - The KML layer transparency can be adjusted in the KML layer Properties panel at the parent node.  Customize layer icons in the table of contents - Layer icons in the table of contents can now be customized at two levels: I. per layer/folder type, and II. Sign in using a browser - Sign in using a browser is available as an option for signing into ArcGIS Online or ArcGIS Enterprise portal. It can also be set as the default option for sign-in.   Block new portal connections - A new administrator parameter, disableAddPortal, has been added in the ArcGIS Earth configuration file to allow disabling new ArcGIS Online or ArcGIS Enterprise portal connections in Portal Manager.   Known Limitation   Feature Description Geocoding Batch geocoding is not available when the geocoding server is not federated with portal. Raster layer The blue to red color ramp is not honored if a raster layer is of scientific data source type. Raster layer Legend info is missing for local raster layer. UI/UX Windows display is not the same between two monitors when they have different DPI. Time slider 'Move by step' in time based animation fails to display consistently while viewing through time slider. ... View more