I have a requirement to show points of interest on a map in the iPhone application I'm working on.
I use MapKit to display maps and locate users.
I could not find a suitable web service to find places or points of interest (restaurants, shops, hotels, etc.) to display on the map.
I know that this can be done because so many applications do it. How they do it is what I'm trying to figure out.
Things i tried
Cloudmade is not really a solution, as their iPhone SDK requires you to use your maps instead of Google in MapKit.
Google Places API - (confuses me). The Places Addresses web page says the service will be launched in July 2010. Now my watch may be wrong, but is it not September 2010 right now? I applied for an API key about a week ago, but have not yet received a response.
Google Maps API Web Services . It is assumed that they provide geocoding and reverse geocoding, etc., but do not have corresponding points of interest.
Javascript Google Maps API I can get a JSON response by calling one of the javascript APIs that returns a list of places based on the request and the given location, but the JSON is invalid - the key names are not in quotation marks, and as such the parser (web or Objective-C) does not parse the result. http://jsonlint.com complains that it is not valid, and if I put quotation marks around the key names, it successfully checks.
Things i noticed
Where to? App from FutureTap does exactly what I need - it shows the places on the map relative to the current location.
I launched Wireshark to see what it does and uses the Google Maps Javascript API (which is when I got the idea to try it first). The only thing that bothers me is how they parse invalid JSON?
Usually I skip something simple, so I hope someone can come and pat me on the head and show me what I missed. This should be a simple solution.
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