DAY 60
Project 16, part one
Do you remember when the iPhone was announced? Seeing Steve Jobs show us on-device maps for the first time was incredible – after at least a decade of maps seeming like dusty old things we can safely ignore, suddenly mapping was cool again.
Suddenly we could pinch and zoom our way around the world, and with one fell swoop the idea of “getting lost” became almost vanishingly impossible. It’s no surprise, then, that Ken Jennings said “even before you understand them, your brain is drawn to maps” – they are awesome things that let us explore the world from the safety of our phone.
Today you’re going to meet a new Apple framework called MapKit, which is designed to make mapping almost instant in iOS apps. It handles fetching data and rendering, it handles scrolling and zooming, and it even handles placemarks, routes, and more – it’s incredible.
Of course, we never learn about technologies as pure theory, so we’ll be putting MapKit to work in a real app that helps show information about placemarks of our choosing.
Today you have three topics to work through, and you’ll learn about MKMapView, MKAnnotation, CLLocationCoordinate2D, and more.
Need help? Tweet me @twostraws!
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