Best practice for using lat/long within a UIView (not MKMapView) - ios

Question

Basically i have a list of POI's (name,lat,long) and i want to draw them on the UIView, relative to my current lat/long. I'm looking for some best practice for mapping these POI (lat/long) to a UIView.
I don't want to use MKMapView (no need for displaying map-data).
I was reading:
http://developer.apple.com/library/ios/#documentation/general/conceptual/Devpedia-CocoaApp/CoordinateSystem.html
But I'm clueless how i get from a CLLocation to a (x,y) on my UIView. I only want to draw those POI's around my current location. So, for example if my screen would represent a 20 by 30 KM region, how do i map my POI's to their corresponding (x,y) coordinates?
Thanks.

Answer 1

What you're doing is a little strange, but you can convert latitude/longitude to a CGPoint-like struct called an MKMapPoint. An MKMapPoint has an x and y value which correspond to points on a map. Imagine if you laid out a flat map of the world, and 0,0 was the top left. MKMapPoint is a point on that map using that coordinate system.
Use the function MKMapPointForCoordinate() to convert a CLLocationCoordinate2D to an MKMapPoint
MKMapPoint myMapPoint = MKMapPointForCoordinate(myLocationCoordinate);
When you get the list of points, you'll have to do something like finding the max and min x and y values, then fitting all the points into your view using those values, otherwise you'll end up with a load of very close points in one place in your view.

Answer 2

My guess is that, for a 20KM by 30KM region, you can consider the earth to be flat and there fore linearly extrapolate the coordinates. I am sure you can google and find out as to how much distance is a difference in 0.00001 in latitude and longitude.
So if you have 20Km to be represented on X axis, and your current location is 30.1234567 in latitude, and 0.0000001 is 1 km then you can put your coordinate in the center of the screen and 30.1234557 as the left most X coordinate and so on.
I am not trying to provide an answer here, but just trying to think out loud, because I wanted to do some thing similar as well and did it as an Internet based app (without display though), where given two coordinates, I had to find the distance between them.

Answer 3

There are many (many) different approaches to modelling the planet and translating 3D coordinates onto a 2D surface, and the errors introduced by the various methods vary depending on what part of the globe you are. This question seems to cover most of what you are after though:
Converting Longitude & Latitude to X Y on a map with Calibration points

Answer 4

I think its best way (correctly work for Mercator projection map):
extension UIView
{
func addLocation(coordinate: CLLocationCoordinate2D)
{
// max MKMapPoint values
let maxY = Double(267995781)
let maxX = Double(268435456)
let mapPoint = MKMapPointForCoordinate(coordinate)
let normalizatePointX = CGFloat(mapPoint.x / maxX)
let normalizatePointY = CGFloat(mapPoint.y / maxY)
let pointView = UIView(frame: CGRectMake(0, 0, 5, 5))
pointView.center = CGPointMake(normalizatePointX * frame.width, normalizatePointY * frame.height)
pointView.backgroundColor = UIColor.blueColor()
addSubview(pointView)
}
}
My simple project for adding coordinate on UIView: https://github.com/Glechik/MapCoordinateDrawer