Book Image

Mapbox Cookbook

Book Image

Mapbox Cookbook

Overview of this book

Maps are an essential element in today’s location aware applications. Right from displaying earth surface information to creating thematic maps displaying plethora of information, most of the developers lack the necessary knowledge to create customizable maps with combination of various tools and libraries. The MapBox platform is one such platform which offers all the tools and API required to create and publish a totally customizable map. Starting with building your first map with the online MapBox Editor, we will take you all the way to building advanced web and mobile applications with totally customizable map styles. Through the course of chapters we’ll learn CartoCSS styling language and understand the various components of MapBox platform and their corresponding JavaScript API. In the initial few chapters we will dive deeper into the TileMill and MapBox Studio components of MapBox and use them to generate custom styled map tiles and vector maps. Furthermore, we will publish these custom maps using PHP, node.js and third party tools like Geoserver. We’ll also learn to create different visualizations and map styles like a choropleth map, a heat map and add user interactivity using a UFTGrid. Moving on, we dive into advanced concepts and focus on integration with third party services like Foursquare, Google FusionTables, CartoDB, and Torque to help you populate and even animate your maps. In the final chapter we’ll learn to use the Mapbox SDK to create and publish interactive maps for the iOS platform. By the end of this book, you will learn about MapBox GL and how to create a fully functional, location-aware mobile app, using the maps styles created in the recipes.
Table of Contents (13 chapters)
Mapbox Cookbook
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Integrating your project with Mapbox GL


In this recipe, we will discover how you can integrate your projects with Mapbox GL.

How to do it…

The easiest way to link to external libraries or frameworks on the iOS platform is via CocoaPods. It's the most popular package manager and is built with Ruby, which is preinstalled in OS X. Also, installing it is extremely easy, as shown:

  1. Open a terminal.

  2. Paste the following command:

    sudo gem install cocoapods
    
  3. After a few moments, CocoaPods will be installed. To make sure that everything is working, you can check the version via the following command:

    pod –version
    

    We will get back something similar to this:

    0.37.2
    

Note

You can learn more about CocoaPods at https://cocoapods.org.

Creating the Xcode project file and linking it to Mapbox GL

Perform the following steps:

  1. Open Xcode, and from the templates, select Single View Application.

    Note

    If you don't have Xcode installed, you can download it for free from the Mac App Store at https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/xcode...