Rolling Your Mapping Apps on the iPad (or the iPhone)
January 27, 2010 17 Comments
One thing that has become crystal clear is the preferred method of having a mapping application on the iPhone and by extension the new iPad is to create a native iPhone/iPad app. That said, the noise sometimes causes people to miss some great web mapping app (as native web apps). I’ve looked into using SVG and even OpenLayers in the past for mapping in the iPhone, but who is rolling their own web apps out there to accomplish what until 2 years ago required a browser on a laptop or desktop? I know there will most likely be a session at the ESRI DevSummit using OpenLayers, but is there a framework people are working with?
Can anyone find me some mobile web mapping applications to love?
About James Fee
Try iGIS by the Geometry company. It’s a light weight GIS program for iPhone/iTouch. Allows for import of shapefiles which are then overlaid onto Google Maps. Allows you change symbology and draw order for each layer. Ability to add simple comments and mark up. It is very good for have a quick map for field verification. It does have some bugs but I think the company will work them out.
Kevin, that looks interesting, but it isn’t exactly what I think James was asking.
What touch frameworks are there out there that people are using. We don’t have any web mapping apps running on the iphone, but our database stuff is done via jQTouch (http://www.jqtouch.com/)
Objective-C isn’t THAT hard. Once you learn the funny square brackets you have trouble coding in languages that don’t have them.
History shows that Apple has long term plans for the way they do things. If you stick with the frameworks and methodologies they push, life will be easier for you down the road when you want your app to run on the 12″ iPad (see Adobe and MS getting burned on 64-bit Carbon, or Intuit getting burned on Java Cocoa). PhoneGap and JQTouch are ok, but they still feel like websites rather than real apps.
I for one am with Cocoa! http://www.imwithcocoa.com
The Google Voice app is as good as any native app would be on the iPhone. The difference is that it also works on other webkit browsers. A native app would be that native to that phone OS. With Google, Blackberry, Palm and Apple all using the same browser, why not take advantage of that?
But they don’t use the same browser. Webkit on all but the iPhone has SVG disabled. I think SVG is the best way to get vector information on a mobile mapping app. I would love to play with this but I don’t have an iPhone and I think the iPhone SDK is for Mac only.
Google Voice is nice, but it still feels like a web page. I touch the Google Voice icon on my iPhone and Safari opens with the webpage. The GV mobile web interface scales horribly to iPad. Change the user agent on your favourite WebKit desktop browser to Mobile Safari, resize the window to something roughly the same size as the iPad and go to voice.google.com. Notice how horribly it scales up to a screen that size?
Screen size issues aside, all mobile platforms have a different UI look and feel, as well as slightly different usage patterns. A single HTML5/JS app for all platforms will look horribly out of place in, best case scenario, all but one of those.
The Pragmatic Studio is the definitive resource for getting started in iPhone Development. iPhone applications development have become increasingly popular for all types of businesses that desire a mobile application. The Pragmatic Studio is the definitive training center for getting started with iPhone applications development, which is heavily involved in Objective-C. Objective-C and iPhone applications development are not trivial topics, and the Pragmatic Studio has the authors who wrote books and frequently present at the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference teaching iPhone Application Development teaching the courses. One of the owners of The Pragmatic Studio, Mike Clark, offers some insights into what exactly is involved in those interested in getting started in iPhone applications development in this exclusive interview. For more details http://www.thebitsource.com/2009/05/16/getting-started-in-iphone-development-with-pragmatic-studio/
Apple released the iPad SDK yesterday and I saw info on a emulator that you can run on OSX from them as well. Easy enough to test. The problem with Apple’s approach is that it is closed now and will only become more so as time goes on.
Wait til Christmas and you’ll have gPad running Android….
Christmas is a loooong way away. And if nexus one sales are any indication then Apple need not fear a “gPad”. If you want to be a threat to Apple then you need to actually ship product in bulk. In the end I think that the relative size of a platform’s app store tells you who is winning.
Forget the iPhone and its closed garden; what we need here is more Android. (insert video of Will Ferrell playing the cowbell on SNL.)
Just don’t try to multi-task on the iPad or iPhone.
exactly-odo, quasimodo.
let’s just say the i(whatever) does one thing, and does it pretty well in a very kewl form factor.
the iPad is a product for the iWant crowd, not the iNeed.
Apple’s revolutionary iPad will rapidly evolve after this initial push launch during it’s unveiling. The A4 chip and Job’s potential to fix defections will definitly to make the iPad a success in the time ahead.
This is a great post on the whole iPad/iPhone issue. Read this with GIS (software, data, processes) in mind also.
http://stevenf.tumblr.com/post/359224392/i-need-to-talk-to-you-about-computers-ive-been
The Cloudmade Web Maps Lite api is iPhone/iPad friendly, but not too sure if there are any good iphone web app examples using it in the wild yet (create/find a full screen map rather than going to the examples pages on your iPhone to see it best).
iPhone SDK includes a MapKit if you want to go native. At the rate things are evolving, in a couple of years Apple may even release its own base maps and Web APIs.
Most existing web mapping APIs, frameworks and existing templates are still very mouse centric and just translates to the touch screen. The iPad will have extensive multi-touch gestures unlike the UI paradigm we’ve been led to so far. I’d look for one that takes advantage of Safari-specific UI enhancements.