Creating overlays on mapview based on user location

Question

I'm trying to create an application that will display all restaurants within the users location. The location will be obtained from the GPS. The problem I am having is it would be unfathomable to create OverlayItems manually for all the possible restaurants in the United States. Did I look over something in the API? I would think that there might be something like this built in.

I thought the Geocoder would be useful, I could get the coordinates from the addresses of restaurants and write methods to create overlay items out of that information, but I would still be missing information such as restaurant name. I'm just looking for suggestions or ideas.

Thanks everyone!

Answer 1

I would use the SimpleGeo service for getting the restaurant data and then using this class: https://github.com/jgilfelt/android-mapviewballoons to add items to the Google map.

What else are you looking for?