Map and Navigation API on S60 3rd FP2

[Sorcery-ltd]

No, thanks that's definitely not the API I wan't. For a start it's for J2ME - which I have no interest in at all at the moment.

I want the new Nokia Map & Navigation API that was originally going to ship with the 3rd FP2 SDK and has been separated out due to licensing issues (and now also delayed by technical issues).

Thanks for the spam though, it was fairly subtle as these things go.

Sorcery

[nickybee]

A follow up question on this.
I am interested in that API aswell. But to address the original question (and some of the answers that Ltomuta gave)

surely the licensing issues relate to realtime GPS navigation and/or sattellite data - not launching the application with some parameters like "lollipops".

Any more news on when the rewritten APIs for this will become available?

Nokia Chat (currently beta labs only) can launch Nokia Maps in exactly this way - with some location parameters - www.nokia.com/betalabs/chat - anybody know how this is done ?

Nick

[ltomuta]

Using the API you would be displaying a map which is created with somebody else's map data. That somebody else believes that your application should be therefore paying a license for using that data For the turn-by-turn navigation service is the user that pays a license, through Nokia Maps.

Making a deal with the data providers is easy, Nokia obviously has such a deal thus Nokia products can use the map data in whichever way and form covered by that license.

What is complicated is making that license available to developers which would transform Nokia in license reseller ...

My advice is to get in touch with e.g. Navteq and see what offer they have, both for APIs and data licensing. In the Smartphone Show I've seen a demo with more wow effect than the Map & Navigation API can provide at this time. See http://developer.navteq.com/site/glo...s/ms/index.jsp

[nickybee]

Hey Lucian - I understand what you are saying - and I agree about the licensing - at the end of the day it's not possible (legally) or desirable for Nokia to overstep the terms of its license. (however technically it might be doable

That said - what the original poster asked - and what I am asking for too - is not a method to extract information from Nokia Maps - but simply a method for "launching" it with some parameters - not for controlling it in any way.

This sort of behaviour should not be against the terms of the Nokia license (because it's almost like keystroke emulation) - but of course having not seen it I do not know exactly what it says.

FYI I checked out the Navteq link you sent - good link thanks for that - their terms of use explicitly state that the following is prohibited

The display of positions and movements of vehicles, persons, or any other objects with the Free Map24 AJAX API resulting from the calculation of the position using technical systems such as, but not limited to, Global Positioning Systems (GPS), Gyroscopes, Radar sensors, Cell-IDs of mobile devices, or similar technology.


so while we could come up with some kind of commercial deal I am of course searching for a shortcut because the idea (I'm fairly sure the original poster had the same idea) was not to reinvent the wheel but merely to add some information into an existing application - in this case Nokia Maps.

So I guess to rephrase your sentence - the issue isn't about re-using the map data - the issue is about launching Nokia Maps with parameters (which obviously Nokia Chat is able to do)

Nick

Using the API you would be displaying a map which is created with somebody else's map data. That somebody else believes that your application should be therefore paying a license for using that data For the turn-by-turn navigation service is the user that pays a license, through Nokia Maps.

Making a deal with the data providers is easy, Nokia obviously has such a deal thus Nokia products can use the map data in whichever way and form covered by that license.

What is complicated is making that license available to developers which would transform Nokia in license reseller ...

My advice is to get in touch with e.g. Navteq and see what offer they have, both for APIs and data licensing. In the Smartphone Show I've seen a demo with more wow effect than the Map & Navigation API can provide at this time. See http://developer.navteq.com/site/glo...s/ms/index.jsp

[ltomuta]

The Landmarks application can do the same, utilising the Show-On-Map and Navigate-To services provided by the Maps & Navigation API. However this particular use case(s) would be subject to a license when used by 3rd party applications although I tend to agree with you, you do nothing more than starting the other application with some parameters.

That said, we are still trying to release the API but this must be the slowest release process I've seen so far and at this point I really don't see the light at the end of the tunnel.

Sorry not to have better news for you.

[nickybee]

thanks for the super fast response - Tommi (Vilkamo) was the one who pointed me at the Nokia Chat app in the first place. Shame we can't just figure out a way to "mimic" it

Shame about the release process - sadly the timing for our app is such that we cannot wait too long - so it sounds like we will have to develop our own S60 native map tiling client - just for display of locations. I have seen the J2ME API solutions out there and while they are pretty cool - the sort of integration we want(in some other parts of our app) with O/S level elements makes J2ME kind of a total pain...

I'll post back here when the app is in beta (in a month or - the back end is already done - we're now doing client side S60, WinMo, Iphone - Android and Blackberry coming up later) - but hey if anything should change in the interim period or if you happen to decide to allow 3rd party devs access to a pre-release API - help a brother out

Nick

[cwhite]

RIM has a very functional Map API for Blackberry which I am using in my apps. I also need the Nokia Map API for a port of our application. How does the licensing for RIM function differently?

[nickybee]

no idea - I'd be very curious about that too.
here's another odd one - many of you might have seen www.mgmaps.com - if you look at the list of suppliers of map data only Google Maps is crossed out - because google officially contacted this guy asking him NOT to pull tiles from the google map servers.

I'm fairly sure Microsoft Virtual Earth has the same licensing yet they haven't issued a cease and desist. (a more recent example is the loopt application - the iphone implementation of which also pulls tiles from Virtual Earth) - weird stuff...because basically if one company can fold (and/or ignore the law or maybe just has a more flexible licensing arrangement) it's a wonder they all can't.

Sadly unless we can reverse engineer the API calls that Nokia Chat or Landmarks is making it looks like we might be forced to develop our own mapping app from scratch just to include S60 as one of our launch platforms. Strange if you think about it because it's in Nokia's interest to push more users onto the platform

Nick

RIM has a very functional Map API for Blackberry which I am using in my apps. I also need the Nokia Map API for a port of our application. How does the licensing for RIM function differently?

[shilpi100]

I am also interested in that API aswell. But to address the original question

surely the licensing issues relate to realtime GPS navigation and/or sattellite data - not launching the application with some parameters like "lollipops".

Any more news on when the rewritten APIs for this will become available?

Nokia mobile which used s60 also launch a new software i.e T9nav software