Expert Feature – Custom Mobile GIS – Web Maps & ArcGIS.com

We launched GeoMobile for ArcGIS to both demonstrate a custom cross platform (one code base which runs on multiple platforms) mobile ArcGIS app, and experiment with porting widgets from the Flex viewer for ArcGIS. The results have been met with enthusiasm by the user community. By adding a configuration file which the mobile app reads at startup, the app allows users to load their own ArcGIS server layers; so those from their own ArcGIS server instance or cloud based. Our work now mostly revolves around building custom tools for use in the mobile viewer.

Two additional areas of work, we have had in our queue:

1) To improve the performance of loaded shapefiles. All mobile apps we have used which include shapefile loaders have left us less than impressed. We are close to having a much improved loader ready.

2) Loading web maps from ArcGIS.com.

The second of these items we gave higher priority. We looked to use the same framework we used for GeoMobile for ArcGIS to load web maps. The results of our work has been beyond pleasing, and opens many new possibilities for building custom mobile ArcGIS apps.

The video below shows a demo of this work. We took the same approach as GeoMobile for ArcGIS, using a configuration file to load the web map. In addition we added a dynamic layer to the config file to overlay the web map. Very cool as you will see. Lastly, we like draw widgets and have one in GeoMobile for ArcGIS. This tool was added it to this mobile app. Here is the demo:

So we can now load web maps from ArcGIS.com, and/or dynamic/feature layers in our mobile ArcGIS viewer. On top of that we can add any custom tools needed by users. We have been sharing this work with the open source community. Though focused on ArcGIS, we are very interested in equivalent efforts in the open source community. We welcome feedback feel free to contact us.