Chapter 3-
This chapter focuses on the ArcGIS Experience Builder. It teaches users when and how to use it, the terminology behind it, the workflow for creating apps, widgets content and style, triggers and actions, and more. The purpose of the Experience Builder is to let you create unique web experiences with more flexible layouts, content, and widgets that act around 2D and 3D data. This gives you lots of creative freedom if creating an app. To begin, you can choose between a premade template or create your own. This also allows you pick the theme of the app and add in the GIS data. You can also include widgets that change function and style based off what your desired action is. The widgets include basic and layout. Basic is mainly for app tools and include map, legend, query, filter, edit, chart, elevation profile, and more. Layout are created to help organize them onto pages or windows. These can also perform different actions: message and data. It can also be altered to fit any screen size based off what the users will likely access it on. The main thing that stood out to me during this reading was how much more advanced the projects on WebGIS appear to be. They also seem to be more audience focused compared to the desktop GIS application. The reading also explains the editions of experience builder which include developer, ArcGIS Online, and Portal for ArcGIS. The tutorial of this chapter focused on creating a web experience of hurricane and earthquake data.
An idea of a project that I could complete using the Experience Builder is an app focused on traffic in populated areas. The experience would take average commuter time, traffic data, and accident density within the area. The app could also include interactive portions that could have live updates of where accidents are to help users find the most efficient route. This app created through the Experience Builder would be aimed to help people living in cities know how the commute time will change based of time of day, and can help them save time.
Chapter 4-
This chapter is all about Mobile GIS. It first explains the advantages that Mobile GIS has over the traditional desktop version. These include mobility (being able to take the device anywhere), location awareness through GPS and cellular data, easy data collection, real-time information, more users, and being overall more versatile. The advantage that has directly impacted me this class has been the mobility. It is much more efficient to do work when I can take my laptop anywhere, rather than having to create a set time to go work in the computer lab. To elaborate off the advantage of more users, a layer is added into Mobile GIS that allows you to alter who can view your project. There are additionally different approaches that come with Mobile GIS. These include browser-based, native-based, and hybrid-based approaches. The browser-based allows users to access through mobile web browsers and can reach all mobile platforms. Native-based requires more developer skills and is an app you download onto your device. While this leads to better performance, they often can not run on all platforms and are more expensive to develop. Finally, a hybrid-based approach uses native components and HTML and JavaScript to build native applications. This loads the data into a native app and lets you have deeper integration onto the platform. The chapter also develops on VGI, VR, and AR and how those work within the software. The most interesting tutorial in this chapter was the one describing how a university wants students, staff, and public to report nonemergency incidents on campus. I found this one interesting because it was very similar to my application idea of last weeks assignment, and was a base of how I could achieve that.
An application idea based off this chapter would be creating a community environmental app. This is similar to an app I used in my Biology class that let us take pictures of native plants and upload them into the app to get a better idea of what plants grow in a local area. My idea to add onto this would be an app that lets people take pictures and add when they plant or create a native garden. This would allow community to see where and how people are doing this, and could promote more people to plant native rather than the typical invasive plants. This specifically uses the advantage of real-time data, mobility, and more users.