Open Radar

 
Using a datasource protocol similar to UITableView, MapView should be able to load the tiles from other providers than Google. This would allow for various interesting types of apps:

- offline maps (using free map tiles such as OSM)
- POIs from different providers (some providers namely MSFT do not allow their POI data on 3rd party tiles)
- enriched maps (tiles that have been preprocessed either on the server or on the client)


- (UIImage*)mapView:(MKMapView*)mapView tileForLatitudeIndex:(int)latIndex longitudeIndex:(int)lonIndex zoomLevel:(int) zoomLevel;

Note that I don't propose using CLLocationCoordinates but integers as index. This is how Google and (to my knowledge the rest of the industry) addresses tiles. Furthermore, I assume that the current MKMapView uses a reuse scheme similar to UITableView to prevent allocating new tile objects after moving/zooming the map.


Then a few methods will be needed to specify min and max of coordinates and zoom levels.

Probably some methods to convert from tile indexes to CLLocationDegrees and vice versa already exist. These should be exposed, too.

I'm open to discuss specific API requirements in more detail.