Here are the new HERE Launchers (hear, hear!)

Tuesday, July 09, 2013

Here are the new HERE Launchers (hear, hear!)

[Nokia] Code Blog - HERE launchers are here

Finally one of the things I personally (and I know loads of other developers) have been awaiting for ages has arrived. Here at Nokia, we’ve had great maps with our devices for many years, but in general if you wanted to use maps in your own application, you had to code it in. And if you wanted it to do something really great, it often meant that you needed to have rather good programming skills. You could do simple routing with just few lines of code though, but implementing a real voice guided navigation was not a trivial task.

Our devices have had really excellent Drive navigation for years now as well—for me it’s really the must have application—and I use it many times daily, saving hours of time when finding ways to new places without effort. Anyway, the application is there, but you couldn’t use the services it provides from your app. So if you wanted to get the user to go to your special locations, there was no nice, easy solution available.

At least, not until now.

HERE Launchers are here now to solve this problem. ...

So, share my excitement and check out the documentation for the HERE launchers located in the Lumia Documentation Library at Nokia Developer. All the source code is available at the Nokia Developer Projects site.

Note that the launchers are available as open source projects, so you can see how they work inside. You will find that they are using the Windows Phone 8 URI schemes for launching the apps.

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HERE Launchers API for Windows Phone 8

This project is hosting the HERE Launchers API library and source codes, as well the demo application illustrating the use of the API.

Getting started

The documentation for the API is located at Nokia Lumia Developer's Library. Full source codes for the demo project as well as for the DLL can be found under the Source tab. All projects are designed to be built with normal Windows Phone 8 SDK. More information on how to get started can be found under the project's wiki.

Demo project information

The structure of the demo application is really simple. When started, you first see the start screen as shown above. In this view you can simply start the different views used to demonstrate the usage of different functionalities provided by the HERE Launchers API.

The views used for selecting the actual functionality are shown below:

HERE Launchers

As a developer, you have been able to integrate maps and route directions into your own applications using the Windows Phone 8 Maps APIs. In addition to that, we are now introducing the HERE Launchers.

HERE Launchers are simple to use APIs which enable you to launch HERE applications from your own Windows Phone application, to perform services provided by those applications.

The API is compatible with Windows Phone 8 devices. Additionally the API requires the HERE applications implementing the services being present in the device. In case the API is used without the implementing application being present in the device, then the user will be forwarded to the Application store for obtaining the required application.

Currently there are three HERE applications which are providing the services implemented in the HERE launchers API: HERE Maps, HERE Drive, and HERE Transit.

HERE Maps, Drive, and Public Transport are available worldwide on all Nokia Lumia Phones, and they may be available for other Windows Phones via Windows Phone store. HERE Public Transport city coverage is listed here: http://here.com/help/transit.

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