Is there a way to have static maps on the iPhone, with either MapKit or a third-party framework? By this I mean fixed area of say, 5 sq miles, which can by zoomed/panned etc, but which doesn't require an internet connection to load the map.
Additionally, is it possible to get route directions, and draw them on the map?
You can of course always roll your own solution with CATiledLayer if the area you want to display is that small, but it's probably better and easier to have a look at routing frameworks like MapBox (http://mapbox.com/blog/introducing-mapbox-ios-sdk/), which provides offline support for iOS.
The MapKit framework doesn't offer offline maps currently.
It is possible to define an area on the maps, and lock the user into that area, but an internet connection is still required.
Maybe a more direct way to do what you want is to download a static image for the zone you are interested in and cache it, using the image of that map area to zoom and pan around in. Of course this would require an initial internet connection but that is really not such an obstacle, after all, one must have a connection to download your application.
You could also provide this image directly into your applications bundle, but you've not really told us much to conclude that the latter option is feasible.
As for routing, it's also not supported currently. You could however retrieve a list of waypoints from point A to B directly from the Google maps remote API - note you cannot do this with MapKit framework.
With these waypoints (which contain coordinates) and the current zoom level value, it's possible for you to plot these points and draw between each one in order to implement your own routing, this get a little ugly or maybe better to say "laggy" when the user begins to zoom in and out as it's only possible to know how to redraw your route when the user ends zooming (lifts their fingers from the screen), but of course like most things in programming, there is a solution to this which is, I feel out of scope for this question.
I hope this helps.
Related
I'm currently building a HoloLens application and have a feature in-mind that requires holograms to be dynamically created, placed, and to persist between sessions. Those holograms don't need to be shared between devices.
I've had a nightmare trying to find (working) implementations and documentation for Unity WorldAnchors, with Azure Spatial Anchors seeming to stomp out most traces of it. Thankfully I've gotten past that and have managed to implement WorldAnchors by using the older HoloToolkit, since documentation for WorldAnchors in the newer MRTK also seems to have also disappeared.
MY QUESTION (because I am unable to find any docs for it) is how do WorldAnchors work?
I'd hazard a guess that it's based on spatial mapping, which presents the limitation that if you have 2 identical rooms or objects that move in the original room, the anchor/s is/are going to be lost.
What I'd LIKE to hear is that it's some magical management of transforms, which means my app has an understanding of its change in real-world location between uses even if the app is launched from a different location each time.
Does anybody know the answer or where I might look (beyond the limited Unity and MS Docs for this matter) to find out implementation details?
Thank you.
I'd hazard a guess that it's based on spatial mapping, which presents the limitation that if you have 2 identical rooms or objects that move in the original room, the anchor/s is/are going to be lost.
We won’t divulge the internal implementation details of the internal coding of the World Anchor but we can state that it is not based on GPS currently with HoloLens v1 or HoloLens v2. Currently, the World Anchor uses the data in the spatial map for placement. The underlying piece that is key is the anchors rely on the spatial scanning and the scanning can use wifi to improve the speed and accuracy, see these two references: 1 & 2
What I'd LIKE to hear is that it's some magical management of transforms, which means my app has an understanding of its change in real-world location between uses even if the app is launched from a different location each time.
It is certainly possible to have two identical rooms with exact layout to trick the mapping to think it is the same room. We document that here:
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/mixed-reality/coordinate-systems#headset-tracks-incorrectly-due-to-identical-spaces-in-an-environment
I use MapManager to show the route. MKroute doesn't work in my country, but it does in US. Can anyone tell me if this only work in only particular countries or it does work everywhere?
The best i can tell is that, for a route, you need a destination and starting point.
When a coordinate preferably the current user position does not have a POI in map mostly due to the fact that apple maps is not completely mapped in your place. By which i mean its besides from showing some main areas and streets, you have nothing other then this feature will not work.
If you know what i mean, then the alternative solution is Google Maps. It has a vast resource and it has information about things apple does not.
But it comes with a price, you need to learn to use Google Maps API which at this point is documented for Objective-C only.
And the callout is somewhat static in Google Maps which you can customize but the hard way.
I am currently working on a project at my home university to create an infrastructure-less indoor navigation iPhone application. I have a couple of questions regarding IndoorOSM and hope that experts here can steer me towards the right direction.
Given an indoor floor plan, how can I make use of JOSM to map it into OSM-XML format? I understand that the floor plan will be represented as nodes, ways, tags and relations with each node having a lat-lon value. As the indoor space I would like to map is located in Singapore where there is little existing mapping work done, I am not sure where to accurately place the floor plan in JOSM before modelling (the buildings are non-existent). The thing is, if I start modelling on a wrong location, the lat-lon values generated in the OSM-XML file will be way off from the lat-lon values in actual real world space, right? In that case I don't think I will be able to make use of the magnetometer to identify where the user is currently at on the map...
In the OSM wiki, it was mentioned that nodes represent a geospatial point and ways are simply a collection of 2-2000 nodes and can be used to represent an area. Pardon my ignorance, but how can I know what's the physical size/area of this "point" or node?
Other than IndoorOSM, is there an easier way to convert an indoor floor plan into something that my application can understand and use easily to allow navigation? I seen a project known as roodin on youtube but I'm not sure how they did the mapping (link).
I'm also working on app with similar functionalities. What I understand is:
1 - When mapping a building you should mapping with correct lat/long. It shouldn't be difficult to get building coordinates if you can go there and check coordinates with a smartphone with GPS. With you can't go there, it's more difficult. Maybe ask someone to do that helps you. But, to start drawing your floor plan, you don't need coordinates. you can do that after finish your drawing
2 - When use JOSM to drawing, it show (in status bar) the length of your way
3 - Currently, I'm sticking with IndoorOSM. I liked the way they reuse nodes, ways and relations to draw a floor plan. That's my recommendation
For my Windows Phone Mango app, I want to make overlay a heatmap on Bing Maps, and a tile overlay seems the best way to do it. I've been having trouble finding any good documentation or code samples to work from. It seems like most people are pointing the tile source to a web service. I'd rather render the heatmap on the phone itself - is that possible?
One of the main reasons to use tilelayers to represent data on a map is that the computation and rendering involved in creating the layer is performed in advance, generally as a one-off or infrequent task. Then, at runtime, the only work the client needs to do is to retrieve the pre-rendered tile images from the server and display them straight on the map, which is a simple, low-resource activity.
Rendering tiles can be a resource-intensive task, both in terms of processing and memory usage - for example, I can only render about 3 tiles per second on a quadcore desktop machine with 8Gb RAM. Even if it's technically possible to create the tiles dynamically on a handheld device, the performance is almost certainly going to be unacceptable for any user. You've also got the question of how you're going to store the data from which the layer is created. Since you're talking about plotting a heatmap, I'm guessing you have a reasonably large dataset of points - did you envisage these stored locally on the device, or retrieved over the network? (either will create different problems).
Basically, while it may be theoretically possible to create tile layers dynamically on the client, doing so would negate almost any benefit of using tilelayers in the first place, which is why you probably won't find any code samples explaining how to do so. Perhaps you could explain your comment why you'd rather create the heatmap on the phone?
It's pretty easy to create a server-side tile renderer using .NET or PHP that renders and server tile images to a Bing Maps client, or you can use an existing map rendering library such as mapnik.org or geoserver.org.
I'm currently trying to decide wether to accept a client's proposal or not. Basically, I'm asked to create a MapView that displays markers at several locations on a map, with the additional requirement that the client's own map tiles are used instead of Google Maps'.
I do not know yet how the client stores their own map tiles, but I was assured that I'd be able to convert them into any format I'd need.
Is it possible to use different map tiles in MapKit's MapView?
Do you have good online literature about this? Links please?
If this is possible, I'd propably have to create a server that sends the files to the device.
How hard is it to create such a server? Is it just "setup apache, done." or is there more to it?
How hard, or time-consuming would both these things be, in relation to just setting up a normal MapView?
Thanks for your answers.
You can't use custom tiles with MapKit. You're limited to using the ones provided by Google.
It could be easier to create a "Google Maps-ish" web app that uses the custom titles and can be viewed on the iPhone through UIWebView?
Have you looked at alternate map frameworks on the iPhone? I know there is at least one open source map engine, also with tiles (that are not as good as the Google tiles, but hey).
A decent set of them is here:
Creating an IPhone Map application
The "easiest" way to do this within the Google Map framework is simply to map the client's map as a texture on top of the "ground." You can create textures at different resolutions, for different zoom factors. Then you won't need to do any special coding at all --- everything will just work.
The way you do this is with a KML region that maps to ground level.
See: http://earth.google.com/outreach/tutorial_region.html