I have a common use case that I haven't found documentation or examples on. I've added data to my iOS Mapbox app via TileSets in MapBox Studio. I'd like to simply implement a UISearch function on the data in that Tileset using some attribute. For example, I've added a TileSet with 100 different roads in some county in Alaska, and I'd like the user to be able to search for a specific road in the search bar. This seems like it should be easier than I am making it, but I've been working on it for weeks. The original data is geoJSON but I'd like it to be hosted in MapBox Studio so I can update the data without needing to update the app once its released.
Note that this is different than the visibleFeatures function which returns MGLFeatures by location or Rect. I really just need to get all features list from a layer so I can populate it in the UISearch functionality.
Any suggestions? Much appreciated.
Update after talking with Mapbox customer support and folks familiar with how to do this.
Two ways to query features in map:
(1) use the MapBox visibleFeaturesAt() function for features within the rendered map: lots of documentation on this. But this is limited in that it only returns features nearby to your mapview camera. If you want to do a big global search, can't rely on this. So second option is
(2) for global searches, transition to using an external database outside of mapbox. Mapbox isn't designed to be searched up globally for features like this question. If you want to search an attribute that is unrelated map-wise to current view, start using a back-end database like FireBase.
Related
I am really just looking for the best way to accomplish this. I've seen the code how to do these individually, but is there a away to do it for say, 100 points? Or do i need to set the custom image and custom info for every point I create?
Also, is there a backend, say SQLite, that i could incorporate the help accomplish more efficiently?
The app I'm building could have 1000's of points, and I REALLY wouldn't want to code everyone of those...but i would!
Thanks
Consider using Google Fusion Tables - they support 100,000 points per layer and 5 layers, for 500,000 points altogether. You access them via an SQL-type language that runs on Google's servers - exactly where your data will be when you upload it and that makes them very fast.
The infowindows are programmable too.
You load your CSV into a Fusion Table (like an Excel spreadsheet) in your Google drive and get a key to that table and you then use the key in your Javascript.
I created the following website with Fusion Tables and I don't have a clue about Javascript! See Skyscan website here. I won't mind if you click View Page Source :-) By the way, if you click on Modern Collections on that page, you are actually turning on/off 25,000 markers and it is almost instantaneous. There is also Marker Clustering available which lets you de-clutter maps with massive numbers of markers and automagically replace them with a single "fatter" marker.
There is a good tutorial here.
I'm trying to make an application that is a map of my High School, in which the user can click a button to search for either a room or a locker.... My goal was to have the room/locker number correspond to a point on several hidden "number lines" in different areas on the Nib file/display, and when a certain input is received, the corresponding number would light up or show its location (i.e. I don't have to enter every locker location for instance, only the first and last one in each hallway, and the number line generated between the values I enter would represent all the lockers in-between).
I'm using Xcode 4.3.3 if that helps.... Structure-wise I wanted to use the Tabbed-application template and have one tab for the actual Map, one for entering which locker you are looking for, and one for entering which room you want to find. I'm new to iOS programming so I don't know if there is a better way to accomplish something like this, and I am open to any suggestions or advice. Thanks!
You could marry MapKit with your own database in which you'd define the coordinates for rooms, banks of lockers, etc. See Location Awareness Programming Guide which shows how to integrate maps in an app. I can imagine that you could define MKOverlay objects for rooms and ranges of lockers. Or you could simply define MKAnnotation objects for points of interest (cafeteria, etc.).
But some combination of overlays and annotations using MapKit seems like a logical solution.
You might also use the MapBox iOS SDK to do this, along with an interactivity layer as described at http://mapbox.com/tilemill/docs/crashcourse/tooltips/
I am developing iOS 5 app which I want to communicate with server providing information about the nearby places for a given location: places locations and annotations. I want to use MapKit to populate my map with this information.
I didn't find any straightforward information regarding the following questions:
Does MapKit has tiles functionality (Google Maps way) out-of-the-box and do I need to work on it additionally, if not?
What is the best practice of retrieving places information (markers positions and annotations) from server?
Is it possible to cache this information so an user can see the nearby places of "his city" in offline mode?
Actually questions 2 and 3 are interrelated: they both address the problem of not retrieving an information (locations + annotations) that is already on map multiple times.
Hopefully I am not overlooking something obvious here.
Thanks!
Update 1: (Regarding places, not maps) More specifically I am interested in, how should I create a "hand-crafted" logical tiles for regions containing the places I fetch from the server, so they would not require refetching themselves when user scrolls the map? I know I can dive into implementing this functionality myself. For example, should I write the places just fetched to a local storage using Core Data immediately after fetching them or organize some queue? Or how could I know when I need to perform a request about the specific region on server and when I just fetch local data that is already on the device? I just want to know, are there any recommended approaches, best practices? Hopefully, I wrote it clear here.
Update 2: I am wondering about best practices here (links, example) not to start creating all this (points 2+3) from scratch. Are there any frameworks incapsulating this or good tutorials?
#Stanislaw - We have implemented the functionality you describe in an app called PreventConnect for one of our clients. The client already had some data stored out in a Google Fusion table. We extended their existing solution by adding another Google Fusion table which stores the geocoordinates for a number of locations. All this being said, to answer your questions...
1) The map portion itself is pretty out of the box, the tiles and what not, but you'll need to do some coding to get zoom extents, pin drops, annotations, and things like that working the way you expect them to work.
2) We found the Google Fusion solution to be quite effective. If you don't want to use Google Fusion there are other cloud database providers like StackMob, database.com, and many others. Google is free and they have an iOS SDK that makes communicating with Google Fusion pretty simple.
3) Absolutely! We cache much of the data in a Core Data store locally on the device. This greatly improves performance and responsiveness.
Time to write a solid answer to this my question (I could have it written a year ago but somehow I lost it from my mind).
Does MapKit has tiles functionality (Google Maps way) out-of-the-box and do I need to work on it additionally, if not?
The answer is yes: MapKit does have it. The keywords here are overlays (MKOverlay, MKOverlayView and others). See my another answer.
See also:
WWDC 2010 Session: Customizing Maps with Overlays,
Apple-WWDC10-TileMap.
What is the best practice of retrieving places information (markers positions and annotations) from server?
Actually since then I didn't learn a lot about "best practices" - unfortunately, nobody told me about them :( - that is why I will describe "my practices".
First of all, there are two strategies of populating a MapKit map with places:
The first strategy is about populating your map with the places by demand: imagine you want to display and see all places nearby (for example, no more than 1km from current user location) - this approach assumes that you ask your server only the places for the box you are being interested in. It means something like: "if I am in Berlin (and I expect 200 places for Berlin), why should I ever fetch the places from Russia, Japan, ... (10000+ places)".
This approach leads to relying on "tiles" functionality that question N1 address: Google maps and Apple maps are usually drawn using 'tiles' so for your "Berlin" portion of map you rely on corresponding "Berlin" tiles that are drawn by MKMapView - you use their dimensions, to ask your server only the places within the "Berlin" box (see my linked answer and the demo app there).
Initially this was the approach I've used and my implementation worked perfectly but later I was pushed to use second approach (see below) because the problem of clustering appeared.
The second strategy is to fetch all the places at once (yeah, all this 10000+ or more) and use Core Data to fetch the places needed for the visible portions of map your are interested in.
Second approach means, that during the first run you send your server a request to fetch all places (I have about 2000 in my app). Important here is that you restrict the fields you fetch to only geo-ones that you really need for your map: id, latitude, longitude.
This 'fetch-all' fetch has a significant impact on my app's first start time (On "the oldest" iPhone 4, I have near 700ms for the whole Fetch + Parse-JSON-into-Core-Data process, and extensive benchmarks show me that it is Core Data and its inserts is a bottleneck) but then you have all the essential geo-info about your places on your device.
Note, that whatever strategy you use, you should do a process of fetching these geo-points efficiently:
Imagine Core Data entity Place which has the following fields structure (preudo-Objective-C code):
// Unique identificator
NSNumber *id,
// Geo info
NSNumber *latitude,
NSNumber *longitude,
// The rest "heavy" info
NSString *name,
NSString *shortDescription,
NSString *detailedDescription, etc
Fetching places efficiently means that you ask only your place records geo-data from your server to make the process of this mirroring as fast as possible.
See also this hot topic: Improve process of mirroring server database to a client database via JSON?.
The clustering problem is out of scope of this question but is still very relevant and affects the whole algorithm you use for the whole proces - the only note I will leave here is that all the current existing clustering solutions will require you to use second strategy - you must have all the places prepared before you run into the clustering algorithms that will organize your places on a map - it means that if you decide to use clustering you must use strategy #2.
Relevant links on clustering:
WWDC 2011 Session: Visualizing Information Geographically with MapKit,
How To Efficiently Display Large Amounts of Data on iOS Maps,
kingpin - Open-source clustering solution: performant and easy-to-use.
Is it possible to cache this information so an user can see the nearby places of "his city" in offline mode?
Yes, both strategies do this: the first one caches the places you see on your map - if you observed Berlin's portion of map you will have Berlin part cached...
When using the second strategy: you will have all essential geo-information about your places cached and ready to be drawn on a map in offline mode (assuming that MapKit cached the map images of regions you browse in offline mode).
I would like to use the Mapkit framework in my app offline, so the user does not have to use roaming to download the tiles. I have seen other maps using google maps and have the tiles in the app without having to download them first.
How could this be done? Could the cached tiles in the cached.db saved somewhere in the project so they are there by default?
Would I need to create an overlay?
I have seen a number of similar questions, but I am still thinking there might be an answer somewhere out there. Is it really disallowed by Google to use their map images offline?
I know that I could use mapbox, but I am also sure the examples I have seen are not using mapbox.
A thread among many that I have searched:
Offline MapKit solution for iOS
Many thanks!
Andras
This is unfortunately not possible on iOS, there´s neither an API for caching nor is it allowing in the Terms of Usage. As you already stated the only way to allow offline mapping is by using other Map frameworks like Mapbox. MKMapView however does cache a few tiles as long as you loaded them while you had internet connection, you just don't have any control over how many tiles get cached or how long they get cached.
you can use overlay technique.Just download one geojson file and fetch data from that which contains coordinates.Plot those coordinates by using overlay.
This method will show your overlay as map in offline mode.
http://railskits.com/map/
Would you like to launch your own
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This is kind of subjective, but I don't find the Google Maps API nearly as daunting as the blurb makes it out to be. I don't think I'd pay half a grand for an API to the Maps API — especially since you can buy a whole book on the topic for like $15 even if you find Google's docs lacking.
This guy doesn't even make it clear what it is he's selling. He makes the features of using the google maps API with Rails sound more difficult than entire feature set of Google maps itself.
There are plenty of other plugins and/or gems available that do more or less the same thing with slightly more effort involved and the book of course (possibly more than one at this point).
If you want a turnkey solution for stacks of money, .NET or some more commercial platform will have more options. I would avoid using this guys solutions out of selfishness, if he does well they'll be others with more colorful marketing making such grand solutions. After which Google will be clogged with them and we'll have to wade through dozens of such spectacular offerings to find the better, albeit less polished (less advertised) open source versions.
Are there any good googlemaps plugins for rails?