[ANN] VirtualEarthKit - Microsoft Virtual Earth for Mac and iPhone

FROM : Colin Cornaby
DATE : Fri Nov 14 19:07:50 2008

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-earth-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.