Development, development, development

Saturday, August 23rd, 2008 Comments 9
  Posted in Blog, Geode

I know we’ve been relatively quiet lately, but not without good reason.  I’ve been coding away here on Geode non-stop and have finished some really cool features.

I’m not sure if you are aware, but one thing Apple didn’t provide in their SDK is a way to implement mapping in third-party programs.  With their beautiful implementation of Google Maps, you’d think they would make this available to third-party developers, but sadly they have not.

A lot of developers have taken various approaches to implementing maps in their programs.  The easy route a lot of people are taking is putting a web view in their app and dropping a layer over top of it to capture touch events and translate that to Javascript.  While this works, it has a few major drawbacks…

• You don’t get the smooth zooming while pinching and unpinching
• You can’t cache tiles outside of Safari’s built in caching, so offline mapping isn’t very reliable
• Panning is slow and choppy
• No ability to rotate the map

A few very popular apps have gotten the mapping right, and they do this by pulling the tile images and natively drawing them.  This enables smooth zooming, panning, rotation, and offline mapping.  The code for pulling this off isn’t exactly simple, but we here at NNI have managed to pull it off and you’ll be happy to find we have a very nice mapping implementation.  I’ll do my best to get you guys a video later this week to show it off.

Aside from mapping, we’ve been working hard on finishing up the details screen, including note entry and attaching photos to a particular cache, as well as marking it Found / DNF.  These will be able to be synced back to your home computer later.

Speaking of syncing, we’re pretty close to finishing our implementation of this major feature.  Another thing Apple doesn’t provide in their SDK is an easy way to sync data to third-party apps.  We’ve got nice syncing apps in the works for both PC and Mac, and all you have to do is tap a “Make Discoverable” button in the settings screen of Geode and it’ll instantly pop up in a list of phones in the sync app and is ready to receive an update.

We know you are all anxiously awaiting the release of Geode, and believe me, we can’t wait to share it with you.  We’ve got hundreds of man-hours and thousands of lines of code invested in this.  We are going to try to get a version in the app store near the end of the month we are calling Geode Companion that’ll enable paperless caching, without the mapping and compass features.  And yes, it will work on the iPod Touch.

We here at NNI promise it’ll be worth the wait

-matt