Optimising the Hellenic Postal Service with ArcPad

The Hellenic Postal Service have looked within their own organization to develop a project that will result in optimised delivery workloads for their postmen. Jumping straight from shapefiles in ArcView 3.2, to a geodatabase in ArcSDE 10 with Oracle 11g, the postal service have designed their own mobile GIS project and now have 48 tablet PC’s and people on the streets using ArcPad, following the postmen to update service points and sides of each road. Once this data is collected, the next phase of the project will be to calculate the times each postman needs to finish each days work. Service points will then be added or removed from each service area, to ensure all postmen have an optimal amount of service points for their work day.

This is a great project that demonstrates how readily ArcPad can used to improve business processes.

How to download ArcGIS Online cached tiles for offline use

Hi everyone,

There is a new download available on the ArcPad Resources site, and it's pretty cool!

The applet allows you to download the tiles of a ArcGIS Server cached map service to your computer/device so you can still have beautiful cartographic basemaps when working without a network connection. This means you can download the area or interest and store it before you even go out into the field. You can also copy it across all your devices before going out into the field.

The tool will allow you to download any number of services that are in your ArcPad map but if you try to download lots of data, it may take some time. So I suggest NOT trying to download the entire planet at level 20!

So head over to our ArcPad Code & App Gallery and have fun!

Export Photo Layer Tool

I noticed that the question of exporting photo layers came up in the recent training seminar, and is also on the Ideas portal. Time to revisit a tool that's actually been in the ArcPad installation since ArcPad 7 - Export Photo Layers to shapefiles. Is it an applet? Is it a tool? Is it a sample? Umm... (all of the above?). This lack of classification probably explains why it seems to have been missed in the various forms of documentation and discussion (Also the fact that there's very little to explain about it, other than its existence). How bout i make up for it right now?

In the ArcPad installation folder you will find a sub folder called \Tools\. In here are three files: PhotoLayerTools.apa, PhotoLayerTools.ico and ExportPhotoLayer.ico. Copy these files to your preferred applet folder (eg: C:\Users\Public\Documents\ArcPad\Applets) and start using the applet in ArcPad.

The applet functionality is very basic:

1. open a photo layer in ArcPad
2. tap the Export PhotoLayer button
3. select the photo layer from the dialog, and tap the Export PhotoLayer button.

When complete you will have a shapefile in your pictures folder, that you can use in other applications. Done.

Watch the Field GIS Seminar again

If you missed the Field GIS seminar, its now online at
http://training.esri.com/acb2000/showdetl.cfm?did=6&Product_id=988
If you saw it the first time, watch the masters of demonstation, Todd and Chad, again.