Question

Pretty much all viewcontrollers in the app I’m building needs a CLLocationManager. Is there any reason not to put it into a global variable (by way of a static class)? The alternative seems to be to set it up separately for every viewcontroller (wasteful) or pass it along to every viewcontroller (messy).

Answer 1

I usually setup a shared instance and call it….”LocationManager”. You can check out an old revision here:

https://gist.github.com/1603316

Xamarin Mobile API is also another good project to get synced up with. The goal is to create a shared library that abstracts away the common interfaces to things like GPS, Accelerometer, Contacts, etc:

http://blog.xamarin.com/2011/11/22/introducing-the-xamarin-mobile-api/

Update: to answer your question the only reason I can think of to NOT to create a shared instance implementation is if you plan on accessing it from a bunch of different threads. To solve for this in my implementation I would simply create thread-safe members with thread-safe access patterns to those members.