MapKit Delegates

Purpose

Originally a piece of sample code for my talk entitled "What You Absolutely Cannot Do With MapKit", this example serves to illustrate how to add a custom callout view to an MKAnnotationView.

Explanation

This example shows how to avoid using the built-in callout views in MapKit. As those built-in views don't provide a lot of configurability, this approach serves as a starting point for developers to build and include their own callout views.

What's Missing

• Animation - the original callout view has a pop animation when added and a fade animation when removed from the view. Nick Farina's SMCalloutView has a great implementation of those animations.

• Positioning and an arrow/pointer - again, Nick Farina has re-created this in painstaking detail.

• Event handling - chances are that, out of the box, the custom callout view shown in this example wouldn't receive any touch events. The built-in callout view uses another subview that covers the entire MKMapView to solve this, plus possibly an overridden version of -hitTest:withEvent: to be able to handle touch events outside its bounds.

Scope

The included Xcode project is ready to build in Xcode 5 and iOS 7.