The next thing I’m going to go through is how to push a new view onto the stack when the user taps the annotation’s call out button. This is relatively straight forward with one annotation, but is a little bit more complicated when it comes to multiple annotations that have all been created dynamically. In this tutorial we’re just going to start out with one and then move onto multiple annotations in the next one. As with all my tutorials you can download the final project to play around with. I’ve also included a second project download mid way through, just because this is a long tutorial.

The first thing we need to do is take a step back and pull apart what we’ve done so far by adding in a Navigation View Controller. Without the navigation controller we won’t be able push and pop the UIViews in and out.

Step 1.
Create a new file, a UIViewController subclass, make sure you have “with Xib for user interface” selected and name it MapNavViewController.

Step 2.
Open the MapNavViewController and make it extend UINavigationController:

#import <UIKit/UIKit.h>

@interface NewsNavViewController : UINavigationController {

}

@end

Step 3.
Now we need to update the update our application delegate to load in the navigation controller. Open the MapKitTutorialAppDelegate.h file and get it looking something like this:

#import <UIKit/UIKit.h>
@class MapKitTutorialViewController;
@class MapNavViewController;

@interface MapKitTutorialAppDelegate : NSObject <UIApplicationDelegate> {
    IBOutlet MapNavViewController *mapNavViewController;
}

@property (nonatomic, retain) IBOutlet UIWindow *window;
@property (nonatomic, retain) IBOutlet MapNavViewController *mapNavViewController;
@property (nonatomic, retain) IBOutlet MapKitTutorialViewController *viewController;

@end

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Everybody seems to want a map based mobile application these days. It’s like the late 90s all over again but with mobile devices instead of Netscape. So to lighten my work load a bit I’m going to show you how to go about making your own, and a few tricks I’ve learnt along the way.

I’m not going to go into detail on how to hook up the IBOutlets or add frameworks to your project, so if you don’t know how to do that this tutorial might be too advanced. Apple have some great sample code for working with the MapKit framework, so as well as doing this tut I suggest you download Apple’s example from here.

I’ve included the project files with this tut at the end, so feel free to download and have a play around. In this tut we’re going to get a map view displaying an annotation (pin) on the map and a map callout popping up with some text on user tap.
The first thing we want to do is create a new view based application in the XCode templates. I’ve called mine MapKitTutorial. We need to add the MapKit framework to our project, this is a very important step and very easy to overlook (trust me, I’ve spent a fair share of hours banging my head against the table). So in your Build Phases under Link Binary With Libraries add MapKit.framework. Now open the MapKitTutorialViewController.h file, the view controller that is visible when the app loads, and get it looking something like this:

#import <UIKit/UIKit.h>
#import <MapKit/MapKit.h>

@interface MapKitTutorialViewController : UIViewController <MKMapViewDelegate> {
    MKMapView *mapView;
    NSMutableArray *mapAnnotations;
}

@property (nonatomic, retain) IBOutlet MKMapView *mapView;

@end

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