Hi there :)

i'm currently working on an native Android app for my company and ran into some problems with Salesforce lately.

I hope i can find some help here.

What i want to achieve:
The company has a lot of Accounts in Salesforce with 3 important fields for the app: Name, Business (Workshop or Parts Dealer) and location(latitude, longitude)
I would like to show those Accounts(Workshops/Parts Dealers) as markers on a google map in my Android app based on a radius around the user's current location. So it would be more than sufficient to get the data as JSON or XML(i read about sObjects, which would be nice too)

The app will be freely available on Google Play Store and every user should be able to see all the Workshops/Parts dealers around the world.

The problem i'm facing is that i can't find a way to fetch the data inside my app without authenticating every user with a Salesforce-Login. 
Which API is the best to use in this case?

It would be so awsome if anybody could help me with this problem.

What i tried so far: 
- SalesforceMobileSDK: If i extend SalesForceApplication i always end up with the Salesforce-Login Screen.
It seems that every client has to be authenticated for API-calls to work. I tried using the method "peekUnauthenticatedRestClient", but this method only works on full path URL's(e.g. "https://api.spotify.com/v1/search?q=James%20Brown&type=artist"), which isn't really practically for my Use-case.

- I feel like i read nearly all docs about salesforce api, but can't quite get my head around how to solve this problem, although it seems like to be a pretty common use-case.  

- would a salesforce-apex method which would select all records inside a set radius around the user's location be accessable without authentication?

Thanks for your help in advance!

Roman

I'm curious what is the best way to host images for CMS type sites. Let's say I have a custom object called Building. It has some fields such as Height, Number of Floors, Year Built, etc. I'd also like to attach an image of the building to the record. Then I have a custom visualforce component that pulls all this data and image into a nice clean output.

 

There appears to be no good way to handle the images. RTF are not an option as the output is impossible to work with. Attaching as documents is like building something with toothpicks and bubble gum as it requires exact naming of the documents so they can be queried properly.

 

There used to be an idea for an image field type that would address this issue perfectly. Upload a single image to a field and then when outputting this field you would get a simple <img> tag. Ideally there would also be something like this: http://sites.force.com/ideaexchange/ideaView?c=09a30000000D9xt&id=08730000000BrdBAAS