Saturday, May 13, 2017

Recreating Apple's current location dot with Google Maps


A few months ago I was tasked with recreating the stock current location dot from Apple Maps with the Google Maps iOS SDK. At the time, the SDK didn't support animated views on the map. This meant I had to do some hackry where I was placing UIViews on top of the map view, and then synchronising their positions to match the map coordinates of the map view. It was ugly. The main problem with this approach is that there was a delay between the map moving, and the relevant callback to update the dot's position.

Since then Google maps for iOS has come along way. I've noticed that Uber's app doesn't have this delay (for the dot, the cars still lag), so I thought it was worthwhile having another crack at the implementation.