iPhone AR Kit

Some nice developers released an iPhone AR Kit. This means that you can process camera images in real time and to some neat stuff with them.

Original Article

iphonear.org

Google Code Project (iphonearkit)

RouteMe: Free Slippy Map

We are currently testing an accelerometer-driven dynamic zooming map application and use RoutMe to display our map.

If you need a free slippy map view for your application, that is independent of Apple's MapKit then RouteMe is the right project for you: http://code.google.com/p/route-me/ .

RouteMe offers a great deal of flexibility as it can display maptiles from different sources such as OpenStreetMap, Google, Microsoft or your own custom tiles.

RouteMe still has some bugs and is in need of contributors, so if you are interested please contact the RouteMe project team.

iPhone 3GS Impressions and Speed

We finally got our first iPhone 3GS yesterday. It at appears to have a much higher performans than the old iPhone 3G. Our autozooming map application, which uses a 10GB tileset consisting of about 3 million individual map tiles, runs almost as smooth as on the iPhone simulator. On the iPhone 3G, on the other hand, we had severe performance problems. On a side note, our iPhone 3GS doesn't seem to have the temperatur problems reported on some websites.

The high performance has two consequences for the iPhone Developer community. The good one is that the iPhone platform is ready for really computational-intensive applications, such as AR using live camera image processing. On the other hand, the iPhone 3GS opens up a compatibility rift between the new devices and the previous generations, forcing developers to decide which devices to support in their applications.

For new iPhone buyers, I would definitely recommend the iPhone 3GS as it seems to run better with the new 3.0 firmware than older devices, due to its increased processing power.

Twitterfeed test#2

testing...

Now using TwitterFeed

Now using TwitterFeed to notify the twitter world of updates on this blog!

My twitter feed is here: Twitter Feed

Loading custom views in nib file

Sorry for not posting for six months -- we've been pretty busy..

So here's a tip for loading custom-implemented views in your nib file. Don't use initwithframe, but initwithcoder:

- (id)initWithCoder:(NSCoder *)decoder {
// required for loading from iface builder
if (self = [super initWithCoder:decoder]) {
// your init code here........
}
return self;
}

Exploring MapKit #1

For a recent project I needed the MapView from MapKit, the private Mapping API used by the iPhones on-board map application. This is not sanctioned by Apple in any way, and we are not deploying our app using MapKit to the AppStore - it is for research purposes only.

Gaining access to this API is fairly easy, but does require some steps to accomplish.

• First, get a copy of the Perl script listed here: [arstechnica.com]. Make sure you update the file paths to the right version of the SDK, i.e. 2.1 to 2.2. By default, the Perl script rips the header files of the private api to: ~/HEADERS
  
• In XCODE, add the ~/HEADERS directory to the include path.
• Import the GMM and MapKit frameworks from the iPhone SDK to your project. As these frameworks are not available for the emulator, you will only be able to run your code using these frameworks directly on the device.
  
• To include a MapView, you need to import the following:
  #import < MapKit/MKMapView.h >
  
• You may have to remove any imports done in MapView.h, and rename the "anonymousstructXX" declared in the header to some sane datatype, such CGPoint. (Use the name of the function as a context to determine the right data type).
• Add a MapView to your UIView and assign the UIView as delegate with the following code:
  map = [[MKMapView alloc] initWithFrame: frame];
  [map setDelegate: self];

You can point the MapView to coordinates of your choice with the following selector:

[map goToCenterLongLat:<#(struct CGPoint)fp8#> zoomLevel:<#(float)fp16#> animationType:<#(int)fp20#>]

There are numerous other selectors in the API, and I'll point out interesting ones once I get to know the API better. In future posts I would like to demonstrate how to change the tiling behaviour (caching more tiles) and how to integrate advanced map features, as well as starting a Street View based on the current map coordinates.