Book Image

Mapbox Cookbook

By : Kastanakis
Book Image

Mapbox Cookbook

By: Kastanakis

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 (8 chapters)
7
Index

Creating a basic map using Mapbox GL


In this recipe, you will learn how to create basic maps with the help of Mapbox GL.

How to do it…

Now that we have integrated Mapbox GL into our project, it's time to learn the basics of the framework. In this recipe, we will create a basic app that shows a Mapbox GL map on screen. Here are the steps:

  1. We will continue from the last step of the previous recipe after we have successfully linked and built our new project.

    Open the Main.storyboard file. Storyboards allow us to visually create user interfaces. The current storyboard already contains ViewController. We will add a new MGLMapView.

  2. Make sure that the Utilities sidebar is visible. If not, click on the Hide or Show Utilities button in the upper-right corner of Xcode. In the lower half of the Utilities sidebar, make sure that Objects are selected.

    A list of the available UI elements will be visible. Find UIView and drag it into UIViewController in the storyboard. As you drag UIView, you will notice that...