MapKit doesn't natively support local search results, so I'm looking for a way to get a list of local pizzerias (or coffee shops, or a specific retailer) via some http api call.
The default google maps api requires javascript, so it's not clear to me how to integrate this into an iPhone app (without displaying a UIWebView).
I have found that a url in a format such as this:
http://maps.google.com/maps?output=json&q=pizza&near=37.3,-122&num=10
Does return a JSON-like list of results, but my usual friendly JSON parser, json-framework, barfs when it tries to parse this (even if I do clever-sounding things like leaving out the "while(1);" at the start of the reply). I'm also not sure how legitimate this URL is to use for this purpose.
I'm on the same quest. It seems that one option would be to perform the local search using Google's AJAX Search API, then plug that data into the mapkit.
That said, it's not entirely clear to me yet that this approach is in the clear vis a vis google's terms of service. Let's see here. Alright, changed my mind because of this. It's a post on google's own ajax api blog including video of a native iPhone app. Looks like this is the approved solution.
Related
I am new to iPhone programming and would like to be able to use the BLAST (is a bioinformatics server) URL's API from the iPhone. I would like to write a very simple application that queries the BLAST server and make some query. I have found the following
I have found the following documentation on BLAST (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/BLAST/Doc/urlapi.pdf).
I am not sure from where I should start.. I checked out the following on security concepts for Mac OS X and iOS(http://developer.apple.com/iphone/library/documentation/Security/Conceptual/Security_Overview/Concepts/Concepts.html) and then found CFNetwork library (http://developer.apple.com/iphone/library/documentation/Networking/Conceptual/CFNetwork/Introduction/Introduction.html).
But I don't really know from where to start..
theoretically I would like to query the BLAST url API from a .mm class method (so I can use standard C) and then show the results in a normal view.
Anyone would be able to guide me in these first steps?
Best regards and Many thanks!
The BLAST API is strange. It is a POST-only command-response API, but the commands you POST are things like CMD=Get&..., CMD=Put&..., etc.
The iPhone SDK provides a fairly convenient high level way to invoke URLs. Have a good read of the NSURLRequest documentation. You'll need to set the HTTPMethod property to POST, and populate the HTTPBody with whatever the BLAST API tells you to post.
I've looked at Google's map API, which is all javascript and terribly slow on the iPhone. I then tried using the link option available at maps.google.com. That is fast but I can't see having much control over it. It also displays a little search box at the top of the map. Google's API says you must use maps in a website, which the iPhone isn't. I'm not sure about licensing for maps.google.com.
Urbanspoon's scope option does everything I want with maps in regards to displaying nearby businesses based on your location. Given the limited set of tools available for Google maps without mapkit, I don't know how they are doing it. It looks as though they have somehow integrated with mapkit. Clicking an annotation shows the callout and another click pushes a new view with details from that pin. Any ideas how this can be done?
-- EDIT --
Just to be clear, mapkit doesn't display surrounding businesses. That's the crux of the problem and I'm not sure how Urbanspoon got past it.
You can also use the Google AJAX Search API: http://code.google.com/apis/ajaxsearch/
It's a Javascript library, but for Flash, and other Non-Javascript environments, the API exposes a raw RESTful interface that returns JSON encoded results.
And within this API, what you want is the 'Local Search' if you are looking for nearby businesses based on the location.
Urbanspoon probably gets the data for the locations of nearby businesses via some other method than the MapKit API.
Then its likely that they use the MapKit API to display custom MapKit Annotations at those locations.
If you are looking for a business data provider you could look into yelp's API.
Is it possible to pull information from a website and display it in an iphone application?
I am looking to pull the current temperature and barometric pressure for an airport from the http://adds.aviationweather.noaa.gov website and display those two pieces of information in an app.
This sounds like a common task that programs do all the time but I'm not sure how it's incorporated into an app.. (what is the process of pulling webdata called?)
What methods or tools are available to do this? I am unfamiliar with handling web data for iphone at this time.
If they have an actual feed for the data, you could access it using NSHTTPRequest and parse the results.
If you need to screen-scrape the data off the page itself, then I would highly suggest creating your own web service to do the parsing and have your iPhone app talk to your web service. The reason being that if they update the page in a way that breaks your screen scraping you would only have to update your web service instead of deploying an update out to who-knows-how-many iPhones.
Just use an NSHTTPRequest and all the related classes to assemble a standard HTTP GET request for the site with the data you need. If there's a data feed (XML, JSON, etc.), you should find out what that URL is and use it instead of parsing the actual HTML of the web page. If not, the method is called "screen scraping" and it basically involves you writing a regular expression to parse the HTML of the web page returned from the server. Again, don't do this unless there is no alternative data feed you can use.
If you need to parse XML, see NSXMLParser. There are open-source solutions for parsing JSON in Objective-C. Just Google around for them.
I'm trying to find a way to search for a business, such as "grocery stores" and display them on a google map around the users current location. This used to be pretty simple with the old URL style of launching the apple map location but I can't find out how to do it with the MKMapView. I understand that I'll need to use the MKAnnotations classes but my problem is with finding the data. I've tried plugging in the URL below to get the info from google but the size of the data seems way too large.
http://maps.google.com/maps?q=grocery&mrt=yp&sll=37.769561,-122.412844&z=14&output=kml
Is there an easy way to just set a property that tells the MKMapView to search for a keyword and display all matching business around my current location? Or does anybody know how to get this information from google?
The KML file that's returned by that search has a lot of information in it. MKMapView doesn't have a way to query Google, so you have a couple of choices:
Use the data that you get from that query with NSXMLParser, and only extract the things you're interested in (probably title, latitude, longitude). KML is just a version of XML.
Look through the Google docs to find a call that gives a more lightweight data format. You can change the format in your url to json, but the information in it is the same.
The file's only about 50KB though. In my experience, downloading and parsing a 50KB XML file takes about 5 seconds over 3G.
Edit: Just found this, thought you might be interested:
Many people transfer data to and from web services to the iPhone via JSON. This is a much better way than using XML. Parsing XML on the iPhone just plain sucks. It's overly complicated and super confusing. Currently the YouVersion app, Bible, uses JSON to transfer everything back and forth from the server and it all works great.
If you don't really have a choice, at least use JSON. Here is a great library for JSON that I currently use
http://code.google.com/p/json-framework/
From here: http://samsoff.es/post/iphone-plist-tutorial/
You can get JSON by changing the request string to this:
http://maps.google.com/maps?q=grocery&mrt=yp&sll=37.769561,-122.412844&z=14&output=json
Another Edit
Here's another JSON library called Touch JSON. I've used this one, and it's quite easy to implement.
https://github.com/acf/TouchJSON
Rather than using the maps?q= string, it is better to use the the official API here:
http://code.google.com/apis/maps/documentation/geocoding/
The JSON replies of the API work with the JSON Parser http://code.google.com/p/json-framework/ better (the other URL doesn't return compliant JSON, and isn't a standard API so may be more subject to change).
I have an internal tool written in java. It would be useful to get a little
feedback on how much it is used by colleagues.
A simple solution would be to have the application display an image which it fetches from
a web hit counter like application and just look at how often the image is accessed.
So what I am looking for: a stand-alone application (i.e. no Apache modules, cgi scripts, etc),
which serves one or a couple of static images and and can log accesses, preferably with as
little as possible of support of everything else.
Searching for "hit counter" gave little relevant, "lightweight http server" was more relevant, although mostly overkill still. Any suggestions?
You could try using Google Analytics. Most of the time, people using Google Analytics are tracking pageviews on a web page, and Google Provides some javascript that you can place on your page and it will track the visits to that page as well as browser capabilities/etc. Behind the scenes, that javascript is placing an image tag on the page in the manner you describe.
However, since your application is java and not a web app (I assume it's a standalone and not an applet), you won't be able to include Google's javascript (unless you embed a javascript interpreter...yick). Fortunately, it is possible to use Google's analytics without javascript.
The trick is that Google's scripts use the image http://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif and pass parameters via the query string. You can find a list of the parameters you can pass to the query string here. So all you'd have to do is figure out what the query string should be and have your client make the request to google's image (after setting up your google analytics account, of course).
Just use Google Analytics, it's really easy and requires a short script on your pages.
Michal Kebrt's simple UNIX HTTP server does exactly what I was looking for.