Chapter 9Exploring Maps and Local Search

WHAT YOU LEARN IN THIS CHAPTER:

  • Displaying a map in an app
  • Getting and showing the user’s current location
  • Using Apple’s local search to display points of interest on a map

WROX.COM CODE DOWNLOADS FOR THIS CHAPTER

You can find the wrox.com code downloads for this chapter at www.wrox.com/go/begiosprogramming on the Download Code tab. The code is in the chapter 09 download and individually named according to the names throughout the chapter.

The availability of maps and showing a user’s location are very handy features of mobile devices. Apple’s Maps app has been part of iOS since the launch of the iPhone. When the iOS SDK became public, Apple included its Map Kit framework for developers to build their own location-based apps, and they’ve been popular ever since.

Location-based search has become a popular feature in iOS apps as well. Urban Spoon was one of the first to use this type of location awareness by enabling you to view restaurants near your current location. Urban Spoon had spent a great deal of time building its database and search infrastructure to support its app and make it one of the most popular apps ever released.

Apple saw how popular location-based search had become. It partnered with the popular local search service Yelp and created new search classes and protocols that it released with iOS 6. With the new additions to Map Kit, developers can search and show local search results with just a few lines of code.

In this ...

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