Maps API for looking up businesses near co-ordinates.

Question

Hi,

I'm currently working on an iPhone application to take GPS coordinates to find the closest electronic stores of my choosing and display them to the the user. I'm familiar with http://stackoverflow.com/questions/683817/google-maps-find-nearest-utilities, but this isn't exactly what I'm looking for. It's also a javascript API. I'd prefer an API where I can give it "best buy near 40.2440, -75.0651" and it'll spit back the address and distance from the store.

I'd rather not go through the hassle of scraping a Google Maps page.

Thoughts?

Answer 1

in the 2.x SDK you have to make use of the JS Google maps api because there is no other way to have access to the google maps api.

For the 3.X SDK it is a feature.

anyhow if you are not bound to use google maps. you can also use cloudmade "CloudMade projects Library"

its has a very nice iphone library or you could use the the services directly

Answer 2

You might try Yahoo's Local Search Web Services:

http://developer.yahoo.com/search/local/V3/localSearch.html

It's a REST API, which means you can just make a NSURLConnection to the properly constructed URL and parse the resulting JSON using something like:

http://code.google.com/p/json-framework/

Biggest limitation is that you may not be able to use this API in a service that you charge for, but you'll need to look into that in more detail. See Usage Guidelines here:

http://info.yahoo.com/guidelines/us/yahoo/ydn/ydn-3955.html