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Smooth Open Street Maps For the iPhone

Posted by samzenpus on from the see-where-you're-going dept.

detrow writes "A number of projects are working on bringing a smooth Open Street Maps Viewer to the iPhone, where smooth means as smooth as the Google Maps application. Route-Me is one of them (New BSD License, complete Objective-C native code). The GPS Mission blog reports that their application (GPS Mission) uses Route-Me and made it to the App Store as the first application using that OSM component. The map looks real nice and behaves just like Google Maps with all the well known zooming and panning available. What other iPhone applications exist that feel as smooth as Google Maps but use the Open Street Map?"

2 of 46 comments (clear)

  1. I hope it... by rossdee · · Score: 4, Funny

    knows about closed streets as well as open ones. Driving down a closed street is often not smooth at all.
    (Of course that is during the pther season of the year (road construction) right now we are in the snow removal season.

  2. Microsoft Virtual Earth also available by maccodemonkey · · Score: 5, Informative

    I worked with the Microsoft Virtual Earth team a few months back to bring their Virtual Earth platform to the iPhone/Mac in native OpenGL and Objective C. I released my work under the BSD license. http://consonancesw.com/developers/virtualearthkit/ The map view is still closed source, as it was done for a client who wanted it to remain closed source for a bit to give his app an advantage, but it should be released soon. The app has been in the app store for a while, it's called NMobile. It's featured an OpenGL map view with full gesture support. The framework I open sourced also does a lot of nifty stuff like geocoding, reverse geocoding, static maps, and I'm adding supporting for finding locations like nearby restaurants and so forth. The route-me folks should keep in mind that their framework looks to implement support for talking to Virtual Earth without authenticating, which is in complete violation of the Virtual Earth terms. Using the Virtual Earth tiles requires sending a SOAP request for a transaction token, and then attaching that transaction token to every request. Their code does not seem to be doing that. Microsoft has warned that people who try to grab their tiles for free will likely be cut off. The route-me folks are welcome to borrow some code from my project (BSD licensed) to bring themselves within spec. At least Microsoft's terms are better than Google's, who doesn't seem to even allow that sort of behavior at all...