Back Story: I was approached to write an app, but iOS isn’t something that have any experience with.
Short Description: Want an app for coverage map for use in an airplane while spraying.
Long Description: The customer has a some airplanes that he uses to spray chemicals on farm fields. They want a system to display a map of the area, a boundary of the field(s) that are to be sprayed on the current flight, and record the flight path of the airplane. The user interface needs to be extremely clean and simple because the user is going to be flying an airplane while using it. Dropbox will be used to transfer data between the airplane and the main office. Someone in the office will create a list of fields that need to be sprayed, and the boundary information of those fields are stored in a shape file format. Those shape files need to be read by the app and displayed over satellite imagery. The airplane already has a high accuracy GPS receiver on it that outputs NMEA position data at 10Hz or faster. The customer also wants to attach a pressure sensor to the spray circuit to monitor if it is dropping spray or not. That information needs to go to the app as well to paint the screen where the plane has already been. This will help the operator to eliminate overlap and skips.
As for getting the GPS position data and pressure data into an iPad, I’m guessing that 802.11 wireless is the simplest way, with that data being supplied in a TCP data stream. I can build a device that makes the data available as a TCP server on a 802.11 wireless network.
From there, I need an app on the iPad that connects to that server to get the data stream. That data gets parsed and turned in to a map.
I have experience with developing apps for Windows in VB.net and two apps for Android. How much difference is there with development concepts in iOS?
I see that iOS uses OpenGL for the graphics, which is ideal for a map. Can I easily access terrain data like is available in Google Earth?
Like dasdom i will encourage you to not begin with that complex project, perhaps divide the several goals in your requirements and make tiny apps for getting in tune with the iPhone SDK, also you have to learn Objective-C that implies that you are already good enough in C programming.
study this topics: Objective-C, iOS Memory Management, sockets, MapKit, Quartz and CoreGraphics, etc.
Or you can buy this excellent book from Aaron Hillegas:
“iPhone Programming: The Big Nerd Ranch Guide”
That book cover almost all topics to introduce your self in the iOS programming madness 🙂