Abhi Beckert wrote: > My biggest question is, what is the best place to get tiles from? My > users will typically want to download tiles from home, and have them > all loaded on the device like a traditional GPS. There seem to be lots > of tile servers out there, which is the best one?
First of all, you absolutely absolutely absolutely must read http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tile_usage_policy OSM does not provide a free tile-serving service for all-comers. As you say that many of your users will be editing the map (yay), I'd guess that the sysadmins will look more leniently on your app than on the dozens of leeching apps that have shown up in the App Store and caused major heartache for OSM. Nonetheless if your usage is significant enough to be noticed, it is by definition causing a problem. At the risk of stating the bleeding obvious, don't hardcode the tile URL you're using into your app. Have it as a configurable string that is fetched from your servers. That way, when/if your access needs to be redirected somewhere else (because your app is super-popular and you've had to sort out your own tile hosting, say), you can do so without having to resubmit to the App Store and leaving your existing users with a broken app for three weeks. I know this is ridiculously obvious but you'd be amazed how many apps, including some very popular ones, have overlooked this. > Or even better, is there any open source code to render the raw vector map > data on an iPhone? I've just asked (on IRC) someone who's working on this and he says "not yet, but possibly in the near future". :) cheers Richard -- View this message in context: http://gis.638310.n2.nabble.com/Some-advice-for-a-new-OSM-client-tp6249209p6249275.html Sent from the Developer Discussion mailing list archive at Nabble.com. _______________________________________________ dev mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/dev
