What is your take on ArcGIS Pro
Background: I'm approaching the end of the 2nd semester of using ArcGIS Pro in an introductory GIS course. In order to be familiar enough to do what I need to in class and help the students do what they need to, I've been using Pro for many of my other GIS tasks as well for over a year. I've brought up the switch to Pro with government and private organizations in our area and out that hire students from us.
#1 - It is soooo stinking slow.
- It is actually quite snappy with SOME things, unfortunately the things that are the slowest are the things you do all the time - namely display your data on the screen.
Before you say "your hardware...!" - I'm currently running ArcGIS Pro on a DELL server with multiple NVIDIA GRID M60 cards. As far as ArcGIS Pro is concerned, I have 16GB of video RAM, 64GB of RAM, and an 8 core Intel(R) Xeon(R) Gold 6154 CPU @ 3.00GHz to myself. It is reporting Direct X 11 at 174 FPS for 1920 x1200 screen.
Locally I run ArcGIS Pro on Windows 10 Enterprise with a 4GHz i7, 32GB of RAM and a 4 GB AMD graphics card and SSD drives.
#2 - It is plagued with UX / interface issues. The very top of this list for me, and many other users, is the frequency of re-drawing, which coupled with the extreme slowness and the lack of any way to interrupt the re-draw (in my experience, the refresh animation in the lower right is only clickable about 50% of the time. When it works, it will start re-drawing again the second you change anything, and since you can't just hit ESC, you have to be quick with your mouse to click something, then get back to the refresh icon... Don't take my word - look at this idea:
- Pause Drawing in ArcGIS Pro
- Some specific examples:
- If you enter values into fields on a geoprocessing tool, or using the SQL query builder, or customize projection parameters, or etc... and click OK or RUN without either tabbing out of that field or clicking into another field, those values are not used.
- Symbology. A LOT of issues here. Here's the example of what brought me here today:
- Started with Esri's detailed cities layer for the USA (Data & Maps for ArcGIS, 2017). A definition query reduced the number of cities to 1093.
- Right now my map is zoomed to the Western USA, Esri's World Topographic basemap.
- I want to change the symbology to reflect the size of the cities by population to start with
- Open the Symbology pane and select Graduated Symbols from the Symbology dropdown.
- The Symbology pane immediately grays out - but there is no movement of the refresh icon in the Map view. There is nothing that indicates anything is happening at all except that it is using 20% CPU.
- After 55.1 seconds, five graduated symbols appear in the Table of Contents. The Symbology pane still grayed out, nothing on the map, but the CPU usage jumps to 50%.
- Another 27.5 seconds go by before the CPU usage drops and the Symbology pane un-grays.
- No cities draw on the map
- I click the refresh icon. I Zoom to Layer. I go to the bathroom and get a drink - still no cities in my map.
- I open the Attribute table (which takes over 30 seconds). The cities are still there.
- I reset the symbology to Single Symbol. 20 seconds, then they're back.
- Start over. Same amount of time (cache?). This time the cities draw at the end.
- HERE'S THE UX PART I STARTED OUT TO ILLUSTRATE:
- Without any input from me, it took all that time to calculate and draw graduated symbols of the GNIS_ID.
- So - I choose Population, and wait again. Same thing for median rents.
- I decide I actually want Proportional Symbols
- Even longer - to get proportional symbols of the GNIS_ID again. Even though Median Rent field was selected when I changed the symbology to Proportional Symbol.
- I finally have proportional symbols for the median rent for a 2 bedroom apartment in all these cities --- See any problems!?
- There are actually proportional symbols in the map
- The ToC is not correct - same sizes, AND note that the highest value over on the Symbology pane is only $5380 while the ToC shows up to $10,000.
- Other results have shown only two symbols in the ToC (both the same size) when there are 5 classes on the symbology pane and are clearly shown on map.
- sorry you got the play by play on that one. But this is pretty typical.
- The inability to create a new project on the root of a drive (or perceived root, e.g. network shares to a personal folder, or a common projects folder, etc.)
- The need to click on a folder, but DON'T go into it (when saving, connecting to folders, etc.)
- Inconsistencies - when a pane is pinned, why do some of the other open panes become tabs at the bottom of the pinned tab while others stay up on the side of the application window?
- Why doesn't the Catalog tab stay at the top of the other tabs?
- Why is there no Servers folder in the Catalog pane by default? Why if I right click in the Catalog pane to add one, the only type is an ArcGIS Server, no WMTS etc.?
- Hidden functionality (see Keyboard shortcuts in the Contents pane—ArcGIS Pro | ArcGIS Desktop for examples of things that are great to have keyboard shortcuts for, but why remove them from the right click? How is anybody supposed to know about these shortcuts?
- Tools that claim to be done / completed, but only did half the job, or didn't do any of it at all. Here's an example - after 3 1/2 hours, it says it "Completed" my Union. There is a new layer in my map. Nothing appears. I open the attribute table. Nothing. I have to go to the History tab on the Catalog pane to see that a Warning that the tool utterly failed to actually do what it is designed to do.
- Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn't. The above example, I ran the Union tool again without any changes and it worked the 2nd time around.
- I've had others that give no warning, but there are large chunks of the new layer that clearly just didn't get processed.
- Messages that are useless/meaningless. Open a layer and try to look at its metadata and you will be told that it needs to be upgraded. No offer to upgrade it. No link to a help article about how to upgrade it. No link to the tool to upgrade it.
- The online help has a NOTE that you will need to take that layer back to ArcMap or ArcCatalog to upgrade it. Why isn't that information in ArcGIS Pro, or a link to that help article?
- World Geocoder is AMAZING! Imagine my surprise when it was able to geocode 100% of a list of addresses in my home state (UT) while my own geocoder using line and point address data from our excellent state database was not able to do so.
- Like the "Warning" that the tool didn't actually produce anything after 3 1/2 hours of working on it, when the World Geocoder says it matched all your addresses you have to do some digging to find out that if it can't find an address on a street, it will just drop the point at the midpoint of the street. If it can't find the street, it will just drop it in the middle of the zipcode or City (not sure which), etc. So - if you have some poor addresses you may find a bunch of "matched" addresses all together in the middle of nowhere, but at the center of Utah.
I know it all sounds bad - but I actually like Pro in many ways. But there are some real deal breakers that keep me heading back to ArcMap & ArcCatalog (10.6 is GREAT!) and wondering if I'm doing the students a favor when they leave here to work in shops that haven't made the jump due to hardware costs and/or time costs, not to mention results that may or may not be complete.
