Chapter 4

Location Recipes

The Core Location framework provides a new way to provide information to applications that is relevant to where the device is geographically located. With the features of this framework, your application can accurately tell where a device is located and even what direction it is facing. There is a variety of applications that have successfully seized opportunities to utilize location-aware information, such as Facebook and Foursquare. iOS 5 continues to improve on the possibilities available and provides new features to convert human-readable locations into geographical locations.

There are three main capabilities that we will deal with in this chapter: location services, GPS, and the magnetometer. Location services are the bare essential functionality that allows your application to access the location of the user. On top of this, by using assisted GPS, you can greatly improve your location accuracy (often at the price of battery life). The magnetometer is included on certain newer devices, which allows an application access to both the heading and bearing of a device.