I’ve learned a great deal about iOS UI in the past couple of months, mostly working on the Artsy Mobile app and the in-Fair experience for the New York Armory Show. I feel incredibly lucky to have Orta from CocoaPods fame sitting a few feet away and being a patient mentor. We’ve built a map that, unlike many similar indoor maps, actually doesn’t suck. Huge kudos to KatarinaBatina, who did a ton of design work and everybody else at Artsy who has contributed boatloads of client and server-side code to make this happen.
A few open-source projects came out of this. I’ve extracted the image zoom portion into ARTiledImageView. It’s capable of displaying really large images at multiple zoom levels that you can tile with another really simple command-line tool, dzt. This has been long available on the web OpenSeaDragon, and is now at your fingertips on iOS. The second library is NAMapKit. It’s a really simple framework that combines an image and map annotations. We’ve hacked on it heavily and I’ve spent a couple of weeks refactoring its code to enable a clean way of supporting multiple map types, including ones backed by tiled images. Finally, shout out to ios-snapshot-test-case and ios-snapshot-test-case-expecta, which make testing of all this UI stuff a breeze.
