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Issue 18.2 ('Listbox Drawing')
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FEATURE

MapKit 3

Implementing Maps in Xojo desktop apps with the MapKitMBS plug-in

Issue: 18.2 (March/April 2020)
Author: Markus Winter
Author Bio: Markus is a Molecular Biologist who taught himself REALbasic programming in 2003 to let the computer deal with some exceedingly tedious lab tasks. Some call it lazy, he thinks it smart. He still thinks of himself as an advanced beginner at best.
Article Description: No description available.
Article Length (in bytes): 16,596
Starting Page Number: 74
Article Number: 18207
Related Link(s): None

Excerpt of article text...

You might have wondered why part 3 was missing last issue, but for one thing I felt I had to dive a bit deeper into how MapKit works in order to better understand why I experience crashes when I use MapKit in Xojo. The problem with that approach is that all the documentation you find about using MapKit is in Swift (or maybe Objective-C, but that is then for older versions of iOS and macOS), and my understanding of Swift is rudimentary.

If you find yourself in the same situation or are just interested in iOS programming with Swift, then I can highly recommend two books by Matt Neuburg of REALbasic: The Definitive Guide fame (and this article leans heavily on his wisdom):

  • iOS 13 Programming Fundamentals with Swift

  • Programming iOS 13

One thing to note: In Swift, whenever you have to pass more than a simple string or a value, then the preferred way seems to be to wrap it all into a class and pass an object instead... so instead of a few strings you would pass some kind of message object. Which means that nearly everything is an object, including parameters and responses. This is actually quite powerful and makes it easy to extend functionality as the addition of another property to the passed object does not require you to rewrite the affected method signatures.

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