Destiny is an app for saving your favorite places. I've been a little unsatisfied with Apple Maps for a couple of years now. One of the features I've always wanted, and my reason for building Destiny, is the ability to save points of interest and custom pins. While Apple and Google Maps are undoubtedly incredible tools for navigation, I found myself using text editors to save lists of addresses and locations when I wanted to remember places and write down some information about them. At some point I ended up wanting a more organized way to handle this.

Getting Started

I made Destiny specifically to save every place that I want to visit. Whether it's somewhere I've been before, or somewhere I hope to go some day, I needed a system that allowed me to organize these places in folders, use tags and save some information about them.

Using Destiny

Destiny works just like Apple Maps (it uses Apple's MapKit SDK). Since it utilizes Apple's severs for searches and requests for details on points of interests, it should provide you with similar search results when looking for something.

The difference between Destiny and Apple Maps is customization. When browsing the map, annotations you create are not only savable, but editable. You could change the name of a point of interest to anything you'd like, as well as using emojis and colors. Below I've saved the address of a campsite and saved some quick information about it.

Saved places support a note, tags and rating. Please don't hesitate to reach out and make suggestions on what custom information you would like saved with your map items.

How it works

Destiny was made with Swift, storing user data in private CloudKit containers. In order to build a robust map view that supports point of interests, search capabilities and customizations I utilized UIViewRepresentable to drop into and integrate with MapKit's MKMapView. The browser is a SwiftUI List persisted with SwiftData. At the end of the day it was just my goal to get in there and learn about MapKit's cool features, all the while trying to expose some of them to the user. It was a nice project that taught me some core iOS concepts, and It's an example of a platform made entirely on Apple's built-in and most recently released software development tools.

Future Updates

I really wanted to create something that could be useful to everybody. Right now Destiny is a simple way to save locations, but I think it can be more than that. I want to make it fun to map things, and I want to make it easy to plan a day of activities. Your feedback is important and will help guide this project. Don't hesitate to contact me with feature requests or bug reports. Also let me know everything you hate about Google and Apple maps so we can make a better map. Thank you!