Getting Started with CartoDB Native Mobile SDK

Welcome to the second blog post of our CartoDB mobile series! I’m back to advise you on how to get started with CartoDB’s native mobile SDK.

Currently we offer the well-proven Nutiteq Maps SDK version 3.x as the CartoDB native mobile SDK. One of the first things you’ll notice is that the Nutiteq SDK is not specific or technically dependent on CartoDB, due to its long history. So let’s get started building your first CartoDB mobile app!

Here are three easy steps to make native apps for your mobile devices with CartoDB:

1. Register an account at developer.nutiteq.com
   As of now, a cartodb.com account is not enough. You’ll need to re-register at the developer.nutiteq.com site, as well as register your app there. You can select the Free Lite package to get started.
   
2. Develop the app
   See the links below.
   
3. Share the app!
   Publish your app to the app store or share privately within your enterprise.
   

For development you’ll need the following resources:

• Developer Getting Started Guides for iOS, Android, Xamarin, and Windows Phone.
• This includes the actual SDK download step, which is suggested to be done using automatic library dependency management tools.
• Developer Guides with detailed code samples for usual tasks.
• A sample mobile app project with both simple (“hellomap”) and advanced (“advancedmap”) samples:
  iOS: github.com/nutiteq/hellomap3d-ios
  Android: github.com/nutiteq/hellomap3d-android
  NET platforms, Xamarin and Windows Phone: github.com/nutiteq/hellomap3d-dotnet
  
• Support: Post to StackOverflow using #nutiteq and/or the #cartodb, #mobile tags.
  If you have a support contract, please use the given email contact and we’ll answer within a day.
  
• Check the public nutiteq-dev group posts (in read-only).

The guidelines for Nutiteq Maps SDK are, as of now, at the developer.nutiteq.com site. Soon you’ll find them in CartoDB’s developer documentation. The guidelines include code samples in several languages, depending on which platform your app targets: Objective-C for iPhone/iPad (iOS), Java for Android, and C# which is usable in both Xamarin (which is cross-platform tool for Android and iOS) and Windows Phone.

Some developers are already using the new Swift language to develop iOS apps, and our SDK supports this too. However we don’t have specific code samples for it, yet. The API is the same as ObjectiveC, so feel free to use ObjC documentation.

Happy data mapping!