Finally diving into making my first mobile app. It is going to be a “Find a Restaurant” feature that helps people find restaurants that have certain types of deals. I’d like to be able to show a map that displays thumbtacks for all of the restaurants in a certain county that have this particular type of deal. That’s probably the easy part - map with thumbtacks. But what I need more help with is allowing the user to let the app detect their GPS location and then point them to say the nearest 5 thumbtacked restaurants and then once they pick one of those they can tap something to then get directions to their selected restaurant. I’ve looked at a number of things that help you get maps going with various features on your site/app and a lot of them have a lot of great stuff but none of them are jumping out at me as readily having this feature I need. So I am open to wrangling an existing map helper application into compliance but if somebody knew a resource that they could point me to that more readily solves my current problem then that’d be great and much appreciated.
Have you tried looking over Google places api? They have a lot of documentation that can help guide you in building your first LBS app. I remember when i build my first app. I was super excited going thru the whole app approval process and etc. Good luck!
What platform are you writing this for? iOS, Android, etc? The advice to give will differ a bit depending on your platform of choice
I was under the impression that using PhoneGap would take care of the differences. Then again, I haven’t used it yet so I could be wrong.
Yes, if you are going to be using a cross platform tool like phonegap, yes, that will sort out both. I just needed to understand which platform you wanted to go with. I have not worked much with phonegap, but their api should be pretty powerful, but I am not sure how they handle the navigation intents, etc.
Nightstalker,
PhoneGap doesn’t change the code. It expects you to make your app in HTML, CSS, and JS (if need be), and place it all in a www folder. Then you use its APIs to access various parts of the phone, such as the camera feature. It doesn’t provide map stuff; you make it work, checking it with Google Chrome tools, and it all goes into your www folder, and PhoneGap wraps it up and displays all your content in a webview.
I know it does not change the code and you use HTML, CSS and JS. I asked my question to make sure what platform OP was talking about. So then if PhoneGap just wraps everything in a webview, as that mean it will use the mobile site version of gmaps?
Good question.