Simulating location updates on the iPhone Simulator

Question

Hi,

I want to allow users to set the GPS information on the iPhone Simulator via GUI.

But I'm not sure how to archieve this - it seems that this tool called iSimulate does this somehow by installing an own SDK. But I can't figure out how they "override" / "hack" the simulator by that.

Thanks!

Answer 1

Hy stephanos,

The information of the GPS cannot be changed. It is protected and I don't believe that iSimulate can change it.

As far as I know, iSimulate is a tool to send commands from a device to the iPhone simulator, like accelerometer, touches, orientation, etc, including the current GPS location.

The SDK of iSimulate works with the app. You have to install the app in the device and add the sdk to your project, so you don't need to buld and run your app to the device all the time that you would be doing normally.

Cheers,
VFN

Answer 2

As far as I know, iSimulate is not employing any hacks. It is code that runs within your app on the Simulator which communicates with a device over the network. When it receives messages from the device (touches, GPS, acceleration) it simulates those events by calling your app's code as though the system had triggered them.

For example, to receive GPS location updates you must create an instance of CLLocationManager and then configure one of your classes to be its delegate. Well, on the iPhone Simulator you can instead start code that sends fake messages to your delegate instead. If you just call a delegate's method like this:

[delegate locationManager:nil didUpdateToLocation:newLocation fromLocation:oldLocation];

Your code won't have to know that the location update is fake. If you want to get fancy, you could create a new class that implements all the public methods of CLLocationManager but which sends fake messages instead. (Since Objective-C is dynamically typed, it won't need to be a subclass, as long as it responds to all the messages you send.)

As a side note, you can use these compiler macros to keep code simulator-only:

#if TARGET_IPHONE_SIMULATOR
   locationManager = (id)[[MyFakeLocationManager alloc] init];
#else
   locationManager = [[CLLocationManager alloc] init];
#endif

Answer 3

You might wanna check out my FTLocationSimulator at http://github.com/futuretap/FTLocationSimulator

It reads a KML file generated by Google Earth to provide continuous location updates. It also updates the blue userLocation dot in a MKMapView with the simulated location updates.