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I'm trying to create an app that will tell a person what zone of a building they are in. I'm using bluetooth dongles to get an approximate location, as oppose to exact location, and show the user on a map whereabouts they are. I would like it just to highlight the zone they are in, instead of a specific location.

I can get my hands on a floor plan of the building I am using so I'm just wondering if there is an easy way to incorporate this into some kind of map with an existing API? I found a question here which states that they just use an overlay on the image to show a marker of where the person is. Would this be a bit easier?

This is for my final year project so I would like to have some sort of flashy map if possible but I'm not sure where to start looking or if it's possible.

I also found this question which gives a great variety of apps that implement and indoor map, but I don't think I can just take this small piece of functionality that I need out of them as they seem to be complete apps.

Any information would be a great help. Anyone with experience in this sort of thing please share your knowledge :)

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Aimee Jones
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It doesn't sound like it'd be too complicated to just write your own custom view for this. Draw the map image to the canvas. Then for the zone the user is in, draw another 'highlight' graphic on top of the map that you just drew.

If you're not sure how to do this, there's a rather basic guide on how to create your own drawable widgets which should point you in the right direction. There are plenty of examples on drawing images to the canvas, eg this one.

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Barry O'Neill
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  • This is a good answer but I couldn't wrap my head around it completely with the time I had left. I will keep looking into it though as its very useful to know. It pointed me in the right direction so thank you! :) For anyone else looking into this, a link in the other question I referenced is for Micello Maps. They have an Android SDK available and are willing to map out buildings for developers. – Aimee Jones Apr 16 '13 at 01:27