MapBox Offers Custom Maps in 30 Minutes or Less!

Here’s an interesting place to visit if you’re interested in maps in general and on iOS in particular: Mapbox!

The particular post we stumbled across was one of the more interesting pieces regarding the latest kerfluffle about Apple apparently nicking out of date OpenStreetMap data,

It was quick work to find the source of the new iPhoto tiles – a sample tile URL looks like:

http://gsp2.apple.com/tile?api=1&style=slideshow&layers=default&lang=de_DE&z=14…

As a result, Iván Sánchez Ortega quickly prototyped a comparison of OpenStreetMap and Apple tiles, and this demo compares Apple, Google, and OpenStreetMap tile sources…

but the really interesting bit is at the end:

In the meantime, if you need more customization than Apple’s Google-based MapKit can provide, we’ve been developing the MapBox stack in that space for a couple of years now and are continuing down that path with our latest projects like Mapresent, a custom geographic presentation tool for the iPad. And if you are looking to make your own maps with OpenStreetMap data, check out AJ’s recent post on creating a custom map of your city in 30 minutes with TileMill and OpenStreetMap.

Also note the MBTiles specification — “makes it easy to manage and share thousands or even millions of map tiles”.

Check out all the goodies on their github, but of particular interest to the iOS developer would be:

mapbox / Mapresent — “The user will be able to present locations, themes, data, transitions, and voice narration on maps, then play the presentation on an external display or export and upload it to a video sharing service…”

mapbox / tilestream-ios-example — “This is an example showing the usage of RMTileStreamSource with route-me. Just grab the project, build it, and go. It should show a sweet-looking colorful map served from MapBox Hosting’s TileStream server…”

mapbox / mbtiles-ios-example — “This is an example showing the usage of RMMBTilesTileSource with route-me. Just grab the project, build it, and go. It should show a sweet-looking dark map based on the included .mbtiles file in the project…”

mapbox / MBTiles-Interactivity-Example — “This iPhone project shows a basic usage of the route-me mapping library, along with its built-in support for offline-capable MBTiles map tiles, together with some custom additions that allow contextual data to be embedded along with the tiles on a per-pixel basis in a space-efficient way. When you touch a country, you get its name and an image of its flag, for the entire world, at six zoom levels, for every pixel on the globe, in a 29MB data file…”

Now that’s a lot of help with whatever mapping project you might have in mind!