I've been working with Microsoft recently in bringing their Virtual
Earth services to the Mac and iPhone. The result is VirtualEarthKit, a
BSD licensed Cocoa framework, managed completely independently of
Microsoft. VirtualEarthKit provides several services to Mac and iPhone
programmers, such as geocoding (place name/address -> latitude/
longitude), international reverse geocode (latitude/longitude -> place
name), static maps, and fetching of individual map tiles. Later
releases will include yellow pages searching, and turn by turn route
guidance.
In addition, I'm also working on a fully native OpenGL based map view
for both Mac OS X and the iPhone. The iPhone map view is already
working and shipping in a iPhone product, but is awaiting some cleanup
before it's added to the svn archive.
On desktop Mac OS X, VirtualEarthKit uses Philippe Casgrain's
excellent CoreLocation implementation:
http://developer.casgrain.com/?p=9
Use of VirtualEarthKit requires an account with Microsoft. Use of
VirtualEarthKit in a shipping application (without watermarks)
requires a contract with Microsoft.
Here's a link to the VirtualEarthKit site:
http://consonancesw.com/developers/virtualearthkit/
Here's a link to a VirtualEarthKit tutorial:
http://consonancesw.com/blog/?p=64
Disclaimer: I don't work for Microsoft, and they don't pay me
anything. This project was designed completely outside of Microsoft,
but with their full blessing and support. Microsoft was even were cool
to link to it in a recent blog post:
http://blogs.msdn.com/virtualearth/archive/2008/11/13/developing-virtual-ea
rth-iphone-applications-with-objective-c.aspx
Disclaimer 2: This API is a work in progress, but I'm hoping the
community can start to build some cools apps with this. Any
contributions are welcome.
