Hello iOS developers!

Unless you have spent last 2 weeks on a beautiful island without Internet access you should be aware by now that Bing released a fantastic native app for iPad.

It's Bing for iPad. The number of 5 stars reviews is impressive and on behalf of the entire team, I thank each of you for sharing your appreciation and gratifing us in spreading the word.

My favorite review of the day is by Cole Schwartz which at the time of this writing states:

There's a little treat that we have in the app and it is a treat that can help iOS developers out there in leveraging our map experience instead of the default provided by the iOS platform.

We've implemented a URL Schema to allow developers to:

• Check if the app is installed
• Pass a map url to our app to display the destination on the Bing map

The implementation of both items above is pretty straight forward for an iOS developer however I want to help out and give you something to drop and build.

- (IBAction)launch
{
	NSString *bingMapsUrl = @"cool_Bing_map_link_here";  // example here
	NSString *appUrl = [NSString stringWithFormat:@"binghd://maps?u=%@", [NSString stringByUrlEncodingString:bingMapsUrl]];
	NSURL *url = [NSURL URLWithString:appUrl];
	[[UIApplication sharedApplication] openURL:url];
}

With the code above you can call from your application Bing for iPad and pass your Bing map address.

It's a little treat that you can offer to your customers within your app without taking all the huge amount of effort of building a solid map experience like the one offered by Bing.

Have fun and let me know if you questions, I want to hear all about from iOS developers engaging with our Bing for iPad app.

-Mario