Having just upgraded my MacBook, I needed to setup some things to do offline maps in my projects again. This time, I did it while using Clarify, and (hopefully) created tutorials as I went along. It's a bit involved, setting up the pre-requisites to use offline maps, so I cut them up into several different 'modules'. From start to finish: Installing CPAN Perl modules: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/115208762/OSMBT/InstallPerlMac.pdf Installing the Map Tile Downloader script https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/115208762/OSMBT/InstallMapTileDwnldr.pdf Building and compiling the map2sqlite project https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/115208762/OSMBT/Map2SQLite.pdf Creating your Map Tile Database https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/115208762/OSMBT/OSMTiles.pdf And finally, after all that, Integrating Offline Maps into your BT Project https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/115208762/OSMBT/BT_RouteMe.pdf I'd appreciate any constructive criticism on this. Cheers! -- Smug Edit: This is not something for the unadventurous or unfamiliar. Xcode familiarity is a definite plus, and there most certainly is some assembly required.

Whoa! Thanks a lot for giving me a weekend play assignment! :-) -- Niraj

A little off topic, but there was a tool on Hacker News recently for converting pdf to html. Its command line based, but its html output is a fairly accurate rendering of the pdf. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4528797 http://coolwanglu.github.io/pdf2htmlEX/

What the heck, the weekend started early on a Tuesday night! :-) 1. I had to update my list of CPAN mirrors with the portals one shown in your screenshot. Otherwise, all the nearby mirrors were bogus. Go figure -- auto-detection failed. 2. The link in the Map Tile Downloader PDF has a space (%20) in it after the Geo- part Bad: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/115208762/OSMBT/Geo-%20OSM-Tiles-0.04.tar.gz Good: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/115208762/OSMBT/Geo-OSM-Tiles-0.04.tar.gz 3. From the "Building and compiling the map2sqlite project" PDF, there is a space (%20) in this link: Bad: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/115208762/OSMBT/%20map2sqlite-1.0.tar.bz2 Good: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/115208762/OSMBT/map2sqlite-1.0.tar.bz2 4. Launch of the Xcode project for the map2sqlite command line tool results in these warnings that I asked Xcode to automatically fix. You made a mention of it, perhaps list these items to help inform the Student on what to expect. - Obsolete build settings of GCC_ENABLE_FIX_AND_CONTINUE and of PREBINDING - Upgrade Base SDK configuration to latest Mac OS X to 10.8 from 10.5 - Upgrade project format from Xcode 3.1 to Xcode 3.2 compatibility 5. For the map tiles, let us know how to deal with negative Longitude and Latitude numbers and in which order to use them for the creation of the map tiles. 6. Whoa! Just saw the last PDF -- 28 pages! TIme for me to sleep, I will start the "Integrating Offline Maps into your BT Project" tomorrow. -- Niraj

Dang, this is a goldmine! I was literally thinking today about an app that would require offline maps...could this have been more timely? ROCK AND ROLL! Mark

Nice done SmugWimp!

That looks awesome! I need offline maps for sure

Amazing. Thanks for the great tutorial. Well done, will have to give it a try sometime. The notes on adding a second project to your project are great. Reminds me of when I was using the Tapku class. It got tricky dealing with build settings for 2 projects. I've been playing with the MKPolyline and the MKOverlay classes lately and they are fun.

Great tutorial, is there a way to include multiple locations from database or csv (10-10000 locations)? thx

Well, you'd add other locations within the code... I haven't gotten that far yet. Basically you're going to need a list of locations, those will go into an array. Then you take the array and loop it through the marker placement code, to place a marker at each array item location. But again, I haven't gotten that far, so I'm not entirely sure how yet, other than the code I've gotten to work so far... As it goes, I will document more. Cheers! -- Smug

Great Smug, I will wait for your tutorial :)

Hi Smug This set of tutorials was brilliant, thank you. Typically however, it all went fine until the very last page of the very last document! The Australian default map showed fine on my phone, etc, it was only when I set it to my own tiles db that I started getting problems. So this is a cry for help but may also be useful information for others. The suggested viewDidLoad code resulted in several errors: autorelease is unavailable: not available in automatic reference counting module ARC forbids explicit message send of autorelease The suggestion I found when searching for this error was to go to my project's targets > build phases > compile sources. I then set the compiler flags for BT_screen_blank to "-fno-objc-arc". So that seemed to allow the code to compile at least (I realise that doesn't necessarily mean it was the correct thing to do!) However, when I now try to open the screen on my phone the app just hangs when I try to open the map screen. Does anyone have any suggestions please? Frustrating to have come this far and it feels so close! Thanks James

Ah, think I've just fixed it. Worth mentioning in case anyone else has the same problem... My tiles.db file had not automatically been included in the Copy Bundle Resources list, so I guess the app was failing to find the required table, etc. To fix this, go to your project (top node in the Project Navigator), then to Targets > Build Phases > Copy Bundle Resources. If you can't see tiles.db in the list, click the plus at the bottom to add it. Map seems to be working so thanks again Smug. I was a bit nervous about even trying this but actually, with your instructions, it's pretty straight-forward - everything's included in your docs. Reckon it took me 2-3 hours so set up all in all and I'm no expert. I now need to figure out how to include markers, current location, etc, on the map, if possible. Have you found out any more on this since the documentation was written? Thanks.

Tried it the newer way now... Probably worth me mentioning on this post that an improved method is detailed here: http://www.buzztouch.com/forum/thread.php?tid=B9F890208160CCEBD169D95&fid=0B19EC7C02CBDD92F12FD08&sortColumn=FT.id&sortUpDown=DESC&currentPage=1

I prefer the Alpstein fork as well. Sorry for the late reply, I just got back from a vacation that kept me off the internet. I'm pretty happy about that. Can you imagine a week without email? It's bliss :) You're correct: The original 'route-me' fork should be used in BTv2 projects. (non ARC) The 'Alpstein fork' should be used in BTv3 projects. (using ARC) I'm working on a plugin that will allow offline maps, however it's based on all these tutorials, so if you get it working the way you want, you may not need to purchase anything. On the other hand, you might be interested because it also includes Android, and the capability of using the same map 'source' to create your map databases (sorry, Android and iOS use different SQLite database formats. Grr!) Happy to see it working for you, If you get stuck, give me a yell (via the forum, so that others can see what we're working with too). Cheers! -- Smug

Just want to say thank you Smug. Your tutorial is fantastic. I'm really looking forward to your plugin though, since I want to create a similar user experience to Android and iOS users. It sounds like the must have plugin for my location based app and could very well become my first paid plugin. Hope it is finished soon. Thank you again for the great work!