Geolocation in iOS: Mobile Positioning and Mapping on iPhone and iPad

Take advantage of iPhone and iPad sensors and advanced geolocation technologies to build state-of-the-art location applications. In this concise hands-on guide, author Alasdair Allan (Learning iOS Programming) takes you deep inside Apple’s Core Location framework, Map Kit, and other iOS tools, using illustrative examples and sample Objective-C code. Learn how to build location-aware apps for both iPhones and iPads, using code that detects hardware features and then adjusts your app’s behavior.

If you’re a programmer with iOS experience, or a Mac developer familiar with Objective-C, this book helps you get off to a solid start in location-based app development.

You’ll learn about:

• Core Location: Understand the significant-change location service and geo-fencing capabilities
• Map Kit: Embed maps into your application’s views
• Magnetometer: Use the on-board sensor as a digital compass
• Geocoding capabilities: Translate geographic coordinates into place names, and vice versa
• Heat maps: Get a code walkthrough for displaying these maps on top of a standard MapKit view
• Third-party SDKs: Add unique geo-location capabilities to your app from SkyHook Wireless, MapBox, and other providers

Alasdair Allan is a senior research fellow in Astronomy at the University of Exeter, where he is building an autonomous, distributed peer-to-peer network of telescopes that reactively schedule observations of time-critical events. He also runs a small technology consulting business writing bespoke software and building open hardware, and is currently developing a series of iPhone applications to monitor and manage cloud-based services and distributed sensor networks.