We want to use MapKit / MKOverlayView to create a map that looks totally customized. We would create a PNG that has the local streets / points of interest, and match that up to MapKit map.
I am finding some info that seems to infer that this is possible, but all the tutorials and examples I find are dealing with drawing lines and polygons, which is not what we want.
I have also considered the possibility of creating the PNG, grabbing the user's location and mathematically calculating their position on the image... but that seems like a bigger task than potentially using a MKOverlayView
Any ideas about how to get started would be much appreciated.
You could start by looking at Open Maps I believe you can customise their maps by creating your own XML file (different styles of roads etc..) You can then download the map tiles as PNGs or lazy load them in your app.
Google maps on the other hand you are not allowed to modify or store in you application.
However if you choose the open maps approach you have to effectively roll your own MapKit. This is tricky but very much possible. Start by looking at the apple developer videos on tiled scroll views.
Related
I am developing a Map based iPhone application where I have to draw a map of any specific region depending upon the current location of that device.
Client is supplying me the .shapefile consisting of all the co-ordinates and data to draw the map.
We can store the shape file on the server and i think to draw the map on device with the data presented on .shapefile I need the tiles with different zoom level. So on the server side I have to convert the .shapefile into tile based file.
But I don't know how to do that conversion.
Can anyone please guide me?
Thanks in advance.
Ritz
Its a lot of work.
First, shapefiles only define the geometry - you need to decide what the features are going to look like. Are they points, lines, or polygons? Do you want them all in the same colour, or depending on their attributes?
Then get mapnik or TileMill and learn how to use that. Do you just want to present the shapefile, or do you want that on a base map? In which case you'll have to generate a transparent tile set and do raster image overlays in your application.
Is it the whole world? And to the same resolution as Google Maps zooms? Get a big bank of disk storage.
http://mapbox.com/tilemill/
http://mapnik.org/
Personally I'd look into converting the shapefile into a vector form that you could render on the client - GeoJSON perhaps. Then serve that.
I understand it's not ideal to change mapkit colors but specifically for a location based game I'm creating I'd like to have to colors much less dramatic and more dark. Is there a built in way that I can accomplish this? Since the game won't be specific to a certain region custom overlays wouldn't really work. I know with the old google maps the only way to do so was to create a javascript version of the map and add it in a webview (not ideal for the game) but with this new apple maps is there a way to redraw the shapes of these elements (parks, water, building) with a different color.
I don't have a complete understanding how the previous or current mapkits work from the ground up so if I'm missing any information or am confusing I apologize.
No there is no way you can do that in the current iOS6 maps.
The MapKit Reference does not have any inbuilt functions to do that.
I would seriously ask you to reconsider changing colors of the current MapKit even if you could do it through some other hack. You might get rejected from the App Store.
You have 2 options
a. Instead use your own maps from other vendors if you want to change colors and so for different places.
b. Overlays are a good way to go too but they are heavy work on REST side of downloading maps. I am currently using this in my map right now because all my map tiles are generated on the fly and I do not have to do too intensive work on the iPhone.
I am creating an iPhone app for OS4.0, and I am attempting to integrate a custom map with a standard MKMapView. I have been provided a map in .eps format (vector image), and I want to somehow overlay this on an MKMapView in and restrict the scrolling boundaries of the map so users cannot scroll outside the boundaries of the custom map. What's the best way to go about this?
I have read some stuff about hosting map tiles on a server, but this seems overly complex for my application. This would just be a map for an attraction roughly the size of a public zoo, so I would think that it would be conceivable to just convert the .eps to a .png file, and overlay it, but this might not give the best performance.
I understand that I could conceivable use a UIScrollView to do the job, but the problem is that I have dynamically generated MKPinAnnotationViews placed on the map, whose position must be based on latitude and longitude, so I can't think on an elegant or reasonable way to do it with a scrollview. Any ideas?
Thanks!
-Matt
Apple has a great bit of example code that will show you what you need to do. Check out the TileMap sample - it is available as part of the (free) WWDC 2010 samples download.
It shows you how to use the gdal2tiles utility to convert an input map into a tree of overlay tiles.
Another good bit of Apple sample code to check out is HazardMap, which is part of the regular SDK samples.
I can see with iOS4 you can now tile an image on google maps (Been looking at the TileMap example from apple). This is great as this is what I want to do, but from what I can see I need to know the GEO reference of the image so I can raster the images with the appropriate zoom levels, etc. What I have is an artist image, which is a map of a specific area and I want to overlay this image on google maps.
Am I missing something here, but can this be done with a none standard map and having different zoom levels?
The main reason why I need to use google maps is because of the GPS functionality, so the user will know where they currently are on the map.
Georeferencing is how you "pin" your image to the world. It is a tricky process, but not too hard once you dig into it.
You've already found the TileMap example code - that is the first step.
Next, check out MapTiler.org. There you will find links and some binaries that you can use to process your image into georeferenced tiles.
If you don't know the lat/long coordinates for your image, you can use Google Earth to interactively overlay the image onto the map, and then copy the coordinates out.
Good luck!
I want to know how to display the route between two Points on
map using mapkit framework in iphone
Is there any Api that can used to display the route between two
Pins. If not Is Polyines is standard to show route between two
pins.Can we display the route on Map with the help of polyines on iphone
or is it dummy route between two points.
Thanks in advance
There's a nice sample on how to accomplish this with a custom MKAnnotationView here: http://spitzkoff.com/craig/?p=108
You can find a working example at http://github.com/leviathan/nvpolyline This solution is especially targeted at iPhone OS versions prior to v.4.0
Although it can also be used in v.4.0 Hope this helps.
You could use Quartz to draw your lines.
Get the context of your map view
Move to the point of your first pin
Add a point to the point of your second pin
Configure your stroke (line-style, width, color)
Draw
A good tutorial about drawing with Quartz:
http://www.cocoadevcentral.com/d/intro_to_quartz_two/
If you do this you will have your app rejected. You are not allowed to use the Google Map tiles (and thus MapKit) for routing.
You can use one of the open map frameworks, they may also support API's for drawing routes atop them. I would explore that before figuring out how to draw your own polylines.