Last wednesday, I took a day off work to attend the iPhone Tech Talk in Paris. Apple had reserved a couple auditoriums at Université Paris 5 (école de médicine), kind of a weird place for a tech event to happen. Nonetheless, the event was pretty interesting (I unfortunately cannot talk about what happened there, because it is under a NDA). Although, I can say that almost all information giving can be obtained by signing up for free access to the iPhone SDK (then you need a 99$/year subscription if you actually want to submit to the app store).
Now that the iPhone SDK NDA is lifted, I can talk freely about my experience using the tools provided by Apple in building GoVelib. As of today, GoVelib was downloaded by over 35000 people in the 65 countries where there is an Apple iTunes store. Of course, the majority of the people who downloaded it are from France. I think that I will open source the code on Google Code pretty soon. There are still tons of things I need to improve in this app, but it’s pretty usable for something I wrote in a few days. I received dozens of e-mails suggesting improvements and thanking me for the app. Open sourcing it will simplify contributions and improvements.
The most painful thing about the current iPhone SDK (I’m talking about version 2.1 here), is that Apple does not provide an official framework for mapping. Developers submitting to the the app store cannot rely on the UI components that are used in the official “Maps” app. On the one hand, Apple is strongly encouraging developers to build there app using the standard components they provided and base their UI designs on patterns seen in the Apple-provided apps (iPod, Stocks, Address Book etc…), but they are seriously affecting the overall quality of map-based apps by not providing a clean, fast, simple API for mapping. Most developers had to reinvent the wheel by implementing their own mapping component. For instance, GoVelib uses a Google Code project that basically uses a UIWebKit (a web browser component) to call the Javascript Google Maps API, this is a pretty lousy, slow and inefficient way of showing a map…. but the GMaps license prevents people from calling the map tiles directly. Another project came out recently, this one actually tries to create a full blown Cocoa-based map component by using royalty free base maps (the old MS Virtual Earth tiles or OpenStreetMap). These basemaps look pretty crappy when compared to GMaps, but at least they’re free.
The most exciting thing that Apple did recently is definitely the opening of an official, Apple-sanctioned, developers forum. I hope that developers who feel the same way I do about maps will let Apple know about it.
Source: edito.qc.ca
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