Thursday, May 29, 2014

Cocoapods Question

If you don't know what Cocoapods is, take a look.  It's basically a source code distribution system and it works really well for small projects used in app development.

For WhirlyGlobe 2.1 we had a Cocoapod spec contributed by a user.  I'm considering updating it.

Advantages


People really like Cocoapods.  The project has a lot of excitement around it and I believe in supporting open source projects (for obvious reasons).

It seems to be pretty nice for novice users.  I make a static distribution for WhirlyGlobe-Maply for the same folks and it gets a lot of use.

Disadvantages


WhirlyGlobe-Maply is no longer a lightweight toolkit.  It's a massive beast which rivals its commercial competitors and surpasses its open source siblings.  [Yes, I'm feeling arrogant today]

Like most good open source developers I use lots of other toolkits where I can.  At present, I count 14 of them.  At some point I'm going pull in GDAL too.  It's as inevitable as death.  But with better features!

What I'm saying here is that the distribution has gotten big.  Kinda big.

Opinions


I'm interested in your opinions.

  • Would you like the podspec updated?  
  • How do you feel about all the dependent libraries?
  • Have you used anything quite this big with Cocoapods?
  • Does anyone do binary distribution for dependent libraries?

Any feedback you have on Cocoapods, good and bad is welcome.  Just comment in the comments.


Saturday, May 24, 2014

WhirlyGlobe-Maply European Tour

I'm heading to Europe in mid-June.  Since I'm flying to another continent, I'm going to pack in as many meetings as I can stand.  And then a few more.

If you'd like to meet and discuss mobile geospatial data visualization and maps, drop me a line and we'll set something up.

Here's the schedule.

London (UK): June 8 - June 9


Jet lag.  Client meetings.  Collaborator meetings.

I know there's an active geo community in London, but I'm not really plugged in to it.  If you are, let me know who I should talk to.

Geneva (Switzerland): June 10 - June 11


I'm giving a talk at the LocationTech event in Geneva.  It'll be fairly high level, I think, with lots of pretty demos.  That coincides with the OGC Technical Meeting at the same time, so it could be an interesting crowd.

Karlsruhe (Germany): June 12 - June 16


I've got an exhibit (e.g. card table) for Maply at State Of The Map - EU.  Maply is obviously the WhirlyGlobe-Maply open source project.  I'll be showing off the latest stuff and, if all goes well, I should have an interesting announcement or two.