New Zealand Esri User Conference 2014

With this years conference at the Skycity Convention Centre still fresh in the mind I thought I’d just put a note out about my presentations.

Monday

DEVELOPERS, DEVELOPERS, DEVELOPERS

This was a half day workshop on the Monday (day 0) of the conference and as the title says, it was aimed at developers. I covered what resources are available to get started with when developing for the ArcGIS platform and how to get the most out of the ecosystem before moving on to some recent improvements and then spending a fair amount of time working with the upcoming Web Application Builder. This is the new WYSIWYG HTML 5 and JS based app for quickly building your own applications, I also went into creating custom widgets and themes. After that there was some fully custom code and a discussion on COTS vs. custom.

Mobility Special Interest Group

On the Monday afternoon I facilitated the Mobility SIG which was a forum for like minded geo geeks to get together and discuss taking ArcGIS mobile. We had guest speakers from Comworth (Darryn Smith), DOC (Martin Slimin) and Isovist (Grant Carroll) so a big thanks to them for their awesome contributions and to everyone else who attended, there were some good topics raised and hopefully there were some interesting takeaways for people.

Tuesday

I’d like to tell you all about the sessions on Tuesday but I actually ended up working on installing Portal for ArcGIS and setting up Collector so that’s that! I did make it to the dinner though in a star trek outfit along with about 100 other people it seemed.

Wednesday

Web Application Builder for ArcGIS

I had 3 sessions back-to-back on Wednesday afternoon (almost long enough to recover from the previous night) and they started with the Web Application Builder for ArcGIS. This was a joint session with @jiriteach and we explained what it is and how it can be used before going on to how you can get more out of it through customization. Either by changing what is provided OOTB or by writing your own widgets and themes.

Extending ArcGIS Online

Next up was extending ArcGIS Online which was a tag team effort by @djmapper and myself. As well as learning about some of the things you can configure and customize in ArcGIS Online, this session also showed that Scott likes to talk, a lot 😋 so we missed the last point which was going to be me probably boring / scaring people by talking about the REST API.

What’s New for Developers

Last up was what’s new for developers. I was joined by Scott again for this and here we ran down a top 10 of recent improvements in the development space across the ArcGIS platform as well as a quick overview of developers.arcgis.com

Wrapping up

If you are interested in checking any of them out just click the links and you can see the presentations. They were all done using reveal.js which was a first for me and I’d like to thank @patrickarlt and @mjuniper for the inspiration and theme which I borrowed / stole. I found it to be far nicer than using PowerPoint as there was no switching between windows / processes since I was already using a web browser and so I could just open links in a new tab.

Feel free to ping me on twitter or leave a comment if you have any feedback.