Thunderhead Explorer

Initially, while working on Gulf Of Mexico Response Map , the legend and table-of-content were two separate windows. That took too much real-estate, and a TOC layer was hard to correlate with the legend swatch by name only. So I set upon merging the legend window and the table-of-content into one window. There is plenty of TOC code as a visual tree component, but it is the legend UI that causes us trouble as there is no REST endpoint to get the layer swatch information. Well with the advent of FeatureLayer somebody can argue that this could be done. But you still have to go back and forth for each layer and get the rendering information. BTW, this will be remedied in 10.1, as a new REST endpoint will be introduced to get _all_ rendering information of a map service. In the meantime, I had to do something. As you can imagine the project map services were very dynamic and the layer content was changing constantly, so having a static legend is out of the question. There were attempt...

A customer came up to me at the User Conference and asked me if I can apply the same overlay method that I used in my OverlaySymbol application to position a geographic referenced image on a web mercator tiled base map; since esri is migrating most of its published maps on arcgis.com to web mercator. After talking it over with my friend Kerry (who is the final authority when it comes to map projections), he recommended that this should be a pixel by pixel operation due to the exponential latitude elongation nature of web mercator. So basically the algorithm is; for each output mercator pixel, convert it back to geographic, find out in the geographic image source what is the pixel color at that geographic location and assign that color to the output mercator pixel. Straight forward, I mean the web mercator transform is well known. I just have to do it a million time, and... that is when I started panicking. A million time loop in AS3 - that will take forever (well actually half a se...