Few Word About Location Technology for iPhone Development
Location based iPhone application development is getting momentum say-by-day as most of the retailers prefer to stay locally in their operations. Another factor is Four Square like social networking apps are increasing in their usage. Same the way tourism, hoteliers, adventurous people and most of the big businesses are looking for the global location system to work in their favor anyhow.
In sum as a iPhone developer you have to encounter some terminologies like GPS or global positioning system, which basically gives you the idea that where you are stay and if your iPhone programming is advance you can get entire map of your location and get guidance to reach at your destination. When we use word GPS we never have idea that is a satellite system built for the use for American military operations. That means that are not for general purpose, but still you can use that as they allow to use for civil purposes unless they feel some threats.
If you are US citizen and stay mostly in US then GPS is okay for you, but you are from non-US citizen or a US citizen who has to frequently travel across the world should know that you may not have good signal of GPS in some part as well as in the highly dense areas like big cities or forests. Now question is that what is the best alternative for such embarrassing situations.
There is a good alternative exists and that is GLONASS, which is satellite system operated by Russian Aerospace Defense Force and that is radio-based satellite navigation system. This project is a big aspirational project for Russia so they have spent nearly their one third of budget in 2012. this is far advance system than GPS of US therefore, most of the iPhone app development companies and iPhone apps developers are preferring to use both system as dual-core location system so you can get your location anywhere on the planet.
Finally, you may ask your iPhone programmer that how this system is working in practice. Lets' say you are stay somewhere on the planet and want to fix your location so you need to have at least four satellite on the view. Basically all GPS and GLONASS have more than 24 satellites so you easily can get four out of them. Now these satellites will work on trilateration procedure where first satellite will locate you, then second one will narrows your location by the intersections of the both satellites' fields of views. Again third satellite will decrease the intersections further and fix two possible point for you. Finally, fourth one calculate timing and location and select one point out of that two created by third satellite.
With combination of GLONASS and GPS you can get accuracy of two meters! Moreover, European Space Agency is jumping in this bandwagon by spending five billion euro creating Galileo location system. Blaah...Blaah!
Conclusion :-
in iPhone development community location based iPhone application development is buzz word and iPhone developers are exploring lots of opportunities in location based iPhone development. But very few iPhone programmers are aware of the words GPS and its alternatives. Therefore, in this location post I have introduced that briefly.