Geospatial Data Display using OpenGL ES (for iOS)

A few weeks ago I gave this talk at the local NSMeetup.  That's a nice venue, primarily for iOS development, with a very strict technical bent.  Most iOS related meetups around here (San Francisco) devolve into meet markets for "technical cofounders".

Anyway, I asked to give a talk and after a bit of back and forth I made it more general than my usual WhirlyGlobe-Maply pitch.  Here it is in its full glory.

Overview

I had about an hour so I couldn't do a full OpenGL ES tutorial.  I tried to distill a few lessons from geodata display, things that you run into when you have more data than you can easily draw.  And of course, how to draw it fast.

There was code!  I honed a few examples related to my favorite problems.  Hit the links below to jump to the code examples in the video.

• Getting Started: Drawing a few boxes
• Speed: Drawing a lot of boxes
• Dynamic Geometry: Adding boxes as you go
• Spheres & Textures: How to make a globe

I tend to think of these as really big problems I throw a lot of code at to fix.  It was interesting to boil them down to their essence in a little code and show the solutions.

The Code

You can get the NSMeetup app source on github.  It has the code examples, as well as links to the code in github gists.

Cubes are like spheres, only less so.

The github gists were an experiment.  I've watched any number of talks with the speaker struggling to use Xcode in less pixels than Xcode would prefer.  And anyway, I do my talks on an iPad because my demos are on an iPad.  So why not show the code on the iPad?

Using gists and a UIWebView let me keep the flow going.  I went back and forth between code and the working example without leaving the app.  I'd definitely do that again.

More Tutorials?

I may do a few more, but just related to WhirlyGlobe-Maply.  This was very interesting, but time consuming and I'm not in the OpenGL ES training business.  If you are in that business, feel free to link to the video if you find it useful.