Glossy Buttons

duncan — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 23:16:21 +0000

Part 1 in a series on how to make glossy buttons in your iPhone applications.

CoreLocation on a Mac

duncan — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 21:47:50 +0000

Matt Gallagher has written a small sample app that demonstrates how to use CoreLocation in Snow Leopard.

It’s interesting to see how some of the iPhone functionality is coming over onto the Mac…

Free, open source iPhone code

duncan — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 05:05:31 +0000

iPhoneDevCamp has a great list of free, open source iPhone libraries and applications.

Among them are ARKit: an Augmented-Reality framework and OpenFlow: a CoverFlow replacement for Apple’s private CoverFlow API.

Book News

duncan — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 00:27:32 +0000

According to the Peachpit website, my book should be available for purchase in just over a week. I’ve made all the example code used in the book available for download here.

iPhoneDevTools

duncan — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 22:29:08 +0000

A new site providing a directory of iPhone development tools.

Snow Leopard developer news

duncan — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 22:13:31 +0000

Jesper give us a summary of some of the Hidden Developer Gems in Snow Leopard.

Marc Charbonneau has also found some articles on Snow Leopard for developers.

Well worth a read..

Cocoa Text System

duncan — Tue, 26 May 2009 03:35:06 +0000

Aaron Hillegass talks about the Cocoa Text System:

http://vimeo.com/4793853.

Launching the iPhone maps application from your own code

duncan — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 05:57:24 +0000

[Update]: The iPhone 2.2. update seems to have broken url’s in the form: maps://maps.google.com/maps?q= however in my initial testing, it seems if you use http://maps.google.com/maps?q= (i.e. using http:// instead of maps://) then things still seem to function correctly – I’ve updated the post to reflect this.

————

This week I spent some time playing around with the maps application on the iPhone and I thought I’d share some of my findings. (Note that since there is no maps application available in the iPhone simulator all of the below will be launched in Safari instead – you’ll have to actually run it on your iPhone to see it in the maps application.)

In it’s simplest form, to launch the maps application at your last location:



    [[UIApplication sharedApplication] openURL:[NSURL URLWithString:@"http://maps.google.com/maps"]];

which gives you something like this:

Getting slightly more interesting, we can specify the latitude/longitude (“ll“) flag to tell the maps application to launch at a specific location (in this case, my workplace):



	NSString *latlong = @"-33.874559,151.219575";

    

	NSString *url = [NSString stringWithFormat: @"http://maps.google.com/maps?ll=%@",

					 [latlong stringByAddingPercentEscapesUsingEncoding:NSUTF8StringEncoding]];

	

    [[UIApplication sharedApplication] openURL:[NSURL URLWithString:url]];

results in:

If you want to get maps to show all the thai restaurants near you, you can specify the query (“q“) flag:



	NSString *name = @"thai";

    

	NSString *latlong = @"-33.874559,151.219575";

    

	NSString *url = [NSString stringWithFormat: @"http://maps.google.com/maps?q=%@&mrt=yp&ll=%@",

					 [name stringByAddingPercentEscapesUsingEncoding:NSUTF8StringEncoding],

					 [latlong stringByAddingPercentEscapesUsingEncoding:NSUTF8StringEncoding]];	

	[[UIApplication sharedApplication] openURL:[NSURL URLWithString:url]];

will give you:

Note that in this example, I’ve include the search mode (“mrt“) flag, with a value of “yp” – this tells maps to search only for businesses – although this is of course not necessary.

Other interesting parameters include the zoom (“z“) flag zoom-level (1-19 defaults is 17 I believe – maps will intelligently alter the zoom level if you specify a query):



    [[UIApplication sharedApplication] openURL:[NSURL URLWithString:@"http://maps.google.com/maps?z=8"]];

zooms out from the previous map:

and the ability to change the map type using the map type (“t”) flag (options are “m”-map, “k”-satellite, “h”- hybrid):



    [[UIApplication sharedApplication] openURL:[NSURL URLWithString:@"http://maps.google.com/maps?t=k"]];

shows the map in satellite mode:

Last, but certainly not least – it’s actually possible to get the maps application to show with your own set of pins dropped on it (rather than using google’s search results as above). In order to do this, you will need to provide a KML file (KML – “Keyhole Markup Language” is a standard for representing geographic annotation – more information can be found here).

This is again done using the query(“q“) flag, but this time you pass in the url of your KML file:



    [[UIApplication sharedApplication] openURL:[NSURL URLWithString:@"http://maps.google.com/maps?q=http://objective-d.com/sample.kml"]];

(in this example, I only have a single entry in my KML file – you can view the file here: http://objective-d.com/sample.kml):

This has just been a taster of the kind of control you have over the maps application, but hopefully it’s got you interested enough to start playing around.

For more information I suggest you check out the handy reference available here: http://mapki.com/index.php?title=Google_Map_Parameters.

If you are interested in including a map from within your iPhone applications, I encourage you to take a look at the iphone-google-maps-component and route-me projects.

objective-d » Code