Cool new AGX toys

At the 2007 ESRI UC today, we heard cool news at the ArcGIS Explorer sessions. The next rev of AGX (they are aiming for a release every 12 weeks) will contain several look-small-but-act-big improvements and one fairly-big improvement. And I put in another vote for multi-threaded tile retrieval, but I'm sure they're tired of hearing about it. Thanks to the always cheerful and friendly ESRI developers at the ArcGIS Explorer island.

• More natural support for geocoding. The geocoding tasks (e.g. Find Place, Driving Directions) will allow input in a single text box, rather than requiring you to separate addresses yourself into street number, street, city, etc. Doesn't seem like much, but it's a usability boon.
• Task Results: Hierarchies, multiple links & views.. If you execute a task that results in dozens of results, you can now put them in folders and associate multiple links and views with them. This is nice when returning, say, all the exploration wells in an area. There might be 50 of them (or more), but you can group them by category (e.g. oil, oil/gas, dry, etc.) and for each create a pre-canned view of the well's very local context or of that well in a larger play-wide view. Less work for the user.
• Open GL. Details still a bit fuzzy, but a nice demonstration of wind vectors across southern California showed the possibilities. As with ArcGlobe, you can volunteer your own OpenGL objects for rendering. AGX will also (at some point) provide primitives for helping map geographic coordinates to drawing coordinates. It's a nice feature that could allow for all sorts of interesting extensions. (Especially for one of the projects I'm working on, where we are already integrating with a code base that makes extensive use of OpenGL... could we simply reproject those objects' vertices and throw them in AGX or ArcGlobe?) Or how long before someone makes a game in the thing?

Apparently an internal AGX once included a 2-D map viewer as well as the globe control it's got now. For global datasets, a map is a better option than a globe which hides half the planet. However it was apparently scrapped because the navigation paradigms are too dissimilar. This makes some bit of sense. The "post 9.3" nirvana is when they are working on a combined 2-D and 3-D rendering engine, and that's when we might see a map control in AGX. I'm sympathetic to the problem—these renderers grew up on their own and have all sorts of organic cruft on them making their merger difficult. Furthermore, once you're 2-D you're in the confusing world (for most end-users, certainly) of coordinate systems. Given the sex-appeal of the globe and the genuine usefulness of 3-D scenes, I can't imagine this being an issue in the public market. But I'd sure like it.

So now I've gone and raved about upcoming features when I just got finished complaining that ESRI was, in general, introducting too many new features at the expense of fixing bugs. For AGX, I think their 12-week cycle puts them at an advantage. As always, the developers at the conference gave excellent, well-practiced presentations and were deeply knowledgeable when asked questions. I hope ESRI's opening up the bug database will provide the sort of positive pressure their management probably needs to let them fix more bugs.