Open Source Bridge

Excerpt

Description

The MapBox team has been hard at work creating offline and mobile map browsing experiences that make it possible for users to better take advantage of geo-visualizations when working in the field. This presentation will focus specifically on the development of the MapBox iPad application, looking both at the use cases that drove its development and the open source software stack that made it possible to create.

The MapBox iPad application is a new, free app that brings custom, interactive, offline-capable maps and geo-visualizations to the iPad. Users can overlay and explore data from a number of sources – including custom tilesets, OpenStreetMap, KML, and GeoRSS. Point clustering, map view saving and loading, easy sharing of map snapshots, and collaboration with other apps on the system are also important features of this app.

In order to make this all possible, the MapBox team made use of open source map rendering libraries and also created some new code of our own. Simple KML is an open source, iOS-native Objective-C KML parsing library based on the also-open source TouchXML. In addition we created the open SQLite-based MBTiles offline tile exchange format to cleanly bundle full tilesets and open source code to support it for map rendering. Along the way, we learned what it takes to work without Apple’s closed mapping libraries on the iPad and iPhone and in a more open environment.

Session attendees will learn about the decision making process that went into choosing high value features for offline and mobile map browsing that could be leveraged in their own mobile GIS app development, and they will also learn about some of the open source tools they could use in their own mobile app development work.

Tags

GIS, iphone, mapping, iPad, visualizations

Speaking experience

Speaker

• 

  Justin Miller

  MapBox
  • Website: http://mapbox.com/
  • Blog: http://mapbox.com/blog
  • Twitter: incanus77
  • Favorites: View Justin's favorites

  Biography

  Justin Miller is the mobile platforms specialist at MapBox, a company making beautiful maps with open source software. He has been hacking open source code professionally since the late 90s and has at various points in his career been a Linux/FreeBSD systems administrator for web hosting companies, a PHP and Drupal developer for non-profits, a Mac OS X and iOS developer for himself and others, and a freelancer in all of the above. He is passionate about startups, open standards, bettering the world through technology, and work/life balance.