False Victories’ Cartographer 1.0 (http://tinyurl.com/m7gu5vb) is a new maps app for Mac OS X (10.9 or later). It’s available at the Mac App Store in the Developer Tools Section for US$13.99.
Cartographer allows developers to add annotations to maps without the need to enter coordinates by hand. The app has been designed to work with Apple’s MapKit framework on both OS X and iOS.
Annotations and shapes can be colored and titled with appropriate details. Once a map has been annotated, the details can be stored as a custom file format, or in the standard GeoJSON format. This exported file can then be used in a developer’s own MapKit application saving the time of having to enter all the data manually.
Cartographer has a range of potential applications and was initially written to aid in the development of an iOS application for a music festival. This allowed numerous different locations within the festival including points of interest to be added and edited quickly, decreasing the App development time considerably and allowing last minute changes.
The Cartographer file format supports all the features of Cartographer. Developers can use the free CocoaPod CartographerKit to integrate it into their own applications.
