Question

I’m using the iOS 6.0 SDK and I would like to route between two different addresses (not latitude and longitude) with Apple’s new iOS 6.0 maps. I would like to show the indications too.

How can I do this?

Answer 1

I looked into do doing this last week and did not figure out a way to do it. It appears that you can give a destination, and you can sort of give it more than just coordinates, but it always assumes your starting position is the current location. That is limiting when you may be planning a trip while you are not currently at the starting location. (But perhaps I am just not seeing how it is done and I hope someone can correct me if that is true.)

A while back I looked into routing options for iOS 6 and gathered the results here…

How would you providing routing for directions between points on a map? What are the missing pieces?

You still may not be able to open up Apple Maps with the exact routing that you want, but perhaps you can draw the route with overlays and annotations on your own instance MKMapView. That may be the best you can do for now.

Below is the code that I used to route to a location and provide at least a label for the destination instead of leaving it to only coordinates. I found that simply giving the destination a label with the full address details would not work, so I just provide that one value.

if (flag != DirectionsFlag_PublicTransit && itemClass && [itemClass respondsToSelector:@selector(openMapsWithItems:launchOptions:)]) {
    NSDictionary *address = @{ (NSString *)kABPersonAddressStreetKey : location.title };
    MKPlacemark *destinationPlacemark = [[MKPlacemark alloc] initWithCoordinate:location.coordinate addressDictionary:address];

    MKMapItem *destinationMapItem = [[MKMapItem alloc] initWithPlacemark:destinationPlacemark];
    if (flag == DirectionsFlag_Driving) {
        [destinationMapItem openInMapsWithLaunchOptions:@{MKLaunchOptionsDirectionsModeKey:MKLaunchOptionsDirectionsModeDriving}];
    }
    else if (flag == DirectionsFlag_Walking) {
        [destinationMapItem openInMapsWithLaunchOptions:@{MKLaunchOptionsDirectionsModeKey:MKLaunchOptionsDirectionsModeWalking}];
    }
}

This code specifically does not handle Public Transit directions since Apple Maps does not do that. I instead have it open up Google Maps with the URL that I was using previously which now opens up Safari for those directions. The flag is an enum value of Driving, Walking or Public Transit. The location is a model which contains various details including title and coordinates.