New In iPhone 3.0 Part 6: Map Kit / Bill Dudney Interview
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Bill Dudney of Gala Factory is the author of the Using Map Kit screencast and co-author of the Pragmatic Press’ book iPhone SDK Programming.
Additionally: In September, in Denver, Bill is speaking at 360iDev. Noel Llopis and I are also speaking, and Noel will be teaching his iPhone OpenGL class — attend both and save $399 — the two days prior to the conference.
In this interview, we talk about Map Kit, its programming model, map annotations, routes, terrain maps, optimization similarities with table view programming and Google and Apple’s collaboration.
We also discuss the treacherous path getting his book to market including shelving the mostly finished project when it seemed the NDA would never be rescinded and having Apple announce 3.0 just as the book was ready to go to press.
You can listen using the Flash player below, download the MP3, or subscribe to the iPhone Developer Podcast using the instructions at the bottom of this post.
For easy scanning of the interview, here is what was covered and when:
- 1:00 Mapkit overview
- 2:00 A view, not a view controller
- 3:30 Adding a map to a view
- 4:45 Setting initial geographic coordinates
- 7:45 Satellite, map and hybrid, but no terrain map
- 9:00 Delegate
- 10:00 Offline mode?
- 12:00 Map annotations
- 13:30 Table-view cell like queuing/dequeuing for map annotations
- 16:00 Handling annotation touch events
- 18:30 Custom annotation views
- 19:30 Dragging an annotation?
- 22:00 MapKit contributed code by Google?
- 24:00 Routes?
- 26:30 A book for curl-brace OO languages but new to Mac
- 28:00 Teaching approach: pragmatic, not to build from the metal upward
- 30:00 “Build like an onion”
- 30:15 15 betas releases, started writing it under the NDA
- 31:30 Shelving the book because of the NDA; reborn!
- 32:30 3.0 announced just before they were ready to ship; more work!
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