Comment by n8cpdx | Hacker News Reader

Comment by n8cpdx | Hacker News Reader

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Disclosure: I work for Esri, creator of ArcGIS, so obviously I'm extremely biased. But I'm not in sales, just a lowly dev fwiw.

QGIS is great software, and I respect what they're doing.

ArcGIS Online is a pretty great option and the Living Atlas [1] makes it really easy to consume a lot of data (a bunch of NASA datasets were recently added) and make cool maps. ArcGIS Online ends up being almost like Dropbox for geographic data, but instead of just files you can get full services, and a suite of apps for taking advantage of the services. That includes taking maps offline, making field edits, and syncing them (although that starts to cost money).

You can try the map tool without signing in, and that gives you a good idea of what you can do in the browser (custom popups, charts, tables, filtering, symbology, clustering, cartographic blending, etc). https://www.arcgis.com/apps/mapviewer/index.html?layers=dece...

The personal use subscription is $100/year and includes the full desktop software and cloud storage. [2]

[1] https://livingatlas.arcgis.com/en/browse/#d=2 [2] https://www.esri.com/en-us/arcgis/products/arcgis-for-person...

edit: forgot to mention there is a great developer story: https://developers.arcgis.com/javascript/latest/sample-code/

ArcGIS is painfully slow. To apply symbology, you need to go to toolbox, select apply symbology, select the layers, select the symbology file, then make sure to select maintain ranges which for an absolute no sense reason is not the default, then click on apply.

ArcGIS then proceeds to apply symbology one layer at a time, taking between 30 to 75 seconds per layer to apply it.

In QGIS, right click in layer, copy symbology, select other layers right click, paste symbology. Done in 3 seconds.

And like that I could be hours and hours talking about similar experiences.

ArcGIS might be much more powerful, but honestly it isn't worth spending 45 minutes to what in QGIS can be done in 5 minutes.

That’s interesting, which product and version of ArcGIS were you using?

I was about to buy the personal use subscription until I learned ArcGIS doesn't run on macOS (unless you use parallels or bootcamp).

Are there any plans for a native macOS version? For someone that wants to learn more about GIS in general, does the web version have what is needed?

I think you can get very far with ArcGIS Online. There are things you can only do in ArcGIS Pro, but basically everything shown in the article (and a lot more) can be done in the browser. And you get a great set of apps (including Field Maps and QuickCapture) for field editing/data capture.

In my personal experience with using ArcGIS, I have only needed Pro in two situations. The first is when I'm trying to georeference a raster (I just bought one from SkyFi). The second is when I've bought a tutorial book that is based around ArcGIS Pro (e.g. Modern Policing Using ArcGIS Pro).

If you want to learn ArcGIS and not rely on Pro, you can visit the learn site and filter to just ArcGIS Online: https://learn.arcgis.com/en/gallery/#?p=agol

I won't say more, but I have personally been impressed by the rate of improvement in feature capability in ArcGIS Online. I am not aware of any plans to move Pro to macOS, I feel your pain there.

ArcGIS online is absolutely not an alternative to ArcGIS Pro. Not even close. Nobody spending more than a small amount of time using GIS beyond being an end user is going to find online a worthy replacement for Pro. It's a publishing platform with a few analytical tools that each cost credits to run, not a spatial sciences package. Online is good for data capture and integration, but not for someone who wants to perform regular or more complex analytics.

There are currently no plans to rewrite ArcgGIS pro for M1 mac hardware according to ESRI. The move to Pro should have made it much easier to do, but its still a huge task.

The ESRI community have recently had a lot of success with M1/2 hardware, Parallels 17+, Windows 11 arm, and ArcGIS Pro. Just note that you won't be making 3d videos with it comfortably. Everything else seems to be working very well.

I feel like Online can do just about nothing with rasters or raster analysis, and that is fully half of GIS.

What is the justification for paywalling a very basic, old GIS function like Raster Georeferencing into an expensive "Pro" category?

ArcGIS Pro is just the name for the current iteration of a desktop suite (after ArcMap). ArcGIS Online lacks many of the „classic“ GIS features, especially raster features.

I think it’s just that the web map viewer is a new product and that feature hasn’t been implemented yet (but I’m not on that team and don’t know their roadmap). And it’s not really a paywall thing since the personal use license gets you both online and desktop apps including Pro.

I installed ArcGIS "home edition" in Windows 10 for Arm on an M1 via Parallels and it performs rather well. QGis has never really been my thing, I guess I learned Arc (3.2) at too young an age and this old dog wont (no time) learn new tricks.

Good question! Also why isn't there a Linux version? Maybe there is some collusion somewhere between two of the major monopolies in desktop computing?

Their server offering includes Linux.

Their desktop version doesn't. Their target audience is large to very large enterprise. Their customer base is overwhelmingly windows based. They know this, so they've shrunk their dev costs to account for it.

Is this an advertisement for esri or a meaningful comment on using QGIS?

A lot of people this post are trying to reach don’t know about ArcGIS. As someone who does know about the GIS field, it is frustrating to see post after post about how to do GIS the hard way. The article is fine, but the whole process could have been much easier using the ArcGIS system, and instead of a PDF you’d get full REST services and a suite of apps to work with them.

This post doesn’t mention ArcGIS at all, except for as a data source that your county government probably uses.

I remember when I didn’t know about ArcGIS and thought it was cool to build apps that put points on MapBox maps - which I later found out is a waste of time, because ArcGIS already does that job well.

I think this post leaves people with the impression that GIS is niche, or difficult, or not accessible to lay users. My personal opinion is that recent advancements in Web GIS make the field about as accessible to people as things like word processing, while QGIS is stuck in the ArcMap days, catering exclusively to trained GIS professionals.

It is absolutely meaningful to point out that you don’t need to be a trained data engineer to do this kind of work, and that this 4,000 word journey could have been done in 10 minutes of clicking around user-friendly software.

Some people don't like monopolies and are trying to advertise the way out.

This has been downvoted but I have to say, living atlas seems like an awesome resource

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