Mobile GIS & LBS Matt Sheehan
Matt holds an MSc in Geography and GIS. He has been working with clients solving problems with GIS for over 17 years. Matt founded WebMapSolutions whose mission is to put innovative, intuitive GIS driven applications into the hands of new and existing users. Custom Mobile ArcGIS OnlineMarch 27th, 2012 by Matt Sheehan
ArcGIS Online and the new ArcGIS 10.1 release are about to provide a plethora of online and offline mobile GIS solutions. We launched GeoMobile for ArcGIS nearly a year ago. The goal was to provide a custom mobile ArcGIS app. We include a configuration file so users could add their own map layers; basemaps, dynamic and tiled ArcGIS layers. The mobile app has proved to be very popular. But the need for a single service, which provides all map data, has nagged at us. To the rescue comes ArcGIS Online and web maps. Now users can publish their ArcGIS layers, shapefiles, CSV, GPX, KML ad WMS to a single service. The associated web map can then be consumed by mobile applications like GeoMobile for ArcGIS. ArcGIS 10.1 is exciting for many reasons. Primarily, in this discussion, because it allows users to generate tile packages for use offline. More on this in a later post. Lets first walk through the steps to publish a web map in ArcGIS Online.
ArcGIS Online & WebMaps – Steps in Publishing your Data1) Sign up for a new account or if you have an ESRI global account, register to become a member of ArcGIS Online: https://www.arcgis.com/home/signup.html 2) This will give you access to a free account with the following features: – Access, Share, and Manage Content (Details) 3) When logged into arcgis.com open the map tab http://www.arcgis.com/home/webmap/viewer.html?useExisting=1 4) Add a shapefile 5) Save the map 6) Make a web application 7) You will now see your data in a web map viewer. Note the url. In our case: http://www.arcgis.com/apps/OnePane/basicviewer/index.html?webmap=492cce45fa144edd95d3f511302ce074 That is it. Very simple. But what about mobile access? Mobile ArcGIS Online DemoWe’ve been building mobile ArcGIS apps now for a couple of years. Our work has mostly focused on ArcGIS server endpoints. We wanted to demonstrate how we can quickly add ArcGIS Online web maps to one of our mobile ArcGIS apps. Taking one of our base mobile viewers, we switched the config file to load the web map above. So using the web maps id of 492cce45fa144edd95d3f511302ce074. The demo below shows the web map running on an Android smartphone: Link to Custom Mobile ArcGIS Online Demo Mobile ArcGIS Online ThoughtsThough we are not exclusively focused on GIS and ArcGIS specifically. Ever more of our time is spent building custom mobile ArcGIS apps. We feel that ArcGIS Online simplifies both the process of sharing spatial data and accessing it via mobile devices. Many of our clients are looking for cross platform solutions; to avoid the cost of building multiple apps for the different platforms; iOS, Android, Blackberry and Windows. In addition they are looking for custom tools which fit their specific workflows. We feel that ArcGIS server and ArcGIS Online will provide us a cost effective way to build custom mobile ArcGIS apps for our clients. Feel free to contact us with your thoughts about mobile ArcGIS Online. Tags: Android, arcgis, ArcGIS Online, GIS, IOS, mobile, mobile GIS, mobile shapefiles, smartphone, web map Categories: Mobile ArcGIS, Mobile GIS |