iOS 6 Application Development For Dummies

Chapter 18

Geocoding

In This Chapter

Understanding geocoding

Getting a feel for reverse geocoding

Displaying the address of the user’s current location

Being able to see where I am on an iPad map has visual appeal — that dot is a real nice shade of blue — but I’m an exacting kind of guy who’d like to know exactly where I am in the scheme of things. I’d like to know the street address of where I’m standing, in other words. Geocoding makes that possible. (If I have the address, I can also write some code to turn the iPad’s current address into an Address Book contact.)

In this chapter, I explain geocoding and have you write the code that will take the user’s current location and turn it into an address that you display in the Current Location annotation. (In the next chapter, I show you how to take an address or point of interest and display it as an annotation on a map.)

Understanding Geocoding on the iPad

Converting an address to a set of map coordinates is called forward geocoding, while converting from a set of coordinates to an address is called reverse geocoding. Both forward and reverse geocoding are supported in Apple’s CLGeocoder class — which is part of Apple’s CoreLocation ...