Subway maps available for iPhone

For now, I've been using hopstop.com where I have internet access to figure out subway issues. I'm excited to have a map once someone figures out a viable workaround.

Yahoo! Email push works, but like docnilay said, the PDF viewer is quite slow. I tried this with an image of the map, but max zoom wouldn't allow me to zoom in enough to make it usable.

The best solution so far is John Sample's series of images. I downloaded and synced them and in thumbnail view they are laid out perfectly, so you can easily go right to the area you need.

Okay so this just worked....

I got the map from here:
http://www.mta.info/nyct/maps/subwaymap.pdf
and then used the directions to email that document to my yahoo email account as follows:
To download documents to your iPhone for later use (later being when you don't have a connection to the Web):

1. Start a free Yahoo! Email Account.
2. Set it up on your iPhone (Settings, Mail, Add Account).
3. Email the Yahoo! Address the file you want to save.
4. The Yahoo! account will 'push' the attachment to you and save it for later viewing.
5. The iPhone's Mail application just became a document viewer!


HOWEVER, I have just found that opening the map is kinda slow... even the "pinch" to expand and zoom in is too slow. And the maximum zoom in is Just Barely big enough to read clearly on the screen.

Its a temporary solution if you need one for now...

I was able to solve the PDF solution, but it requires Yahoo Mail or an IMAP account. You can email yourself a pan/zoomable PDF of the map (I still had to restrict them to each of the four boroughs.)

The downside is that, unless you're using Yahoo Mail or an IMAP mail account, you have to re-download the message EVERY time, which might give you that lovely "This Message Has Not Been Downloaded" note instead. Yahoo Mail allows you to actually download the map straight to your iPhone.

I was just in the Apple Store playing around with na iPhone today and they had a demo email account with some messages in it on the phones. In one of the emails they had what looked like a vectorized PDF of the subway map for Paris.

I was able to double tap and pinch in/out with no loss of resolution.

You could just keep a special folder of this kind of stuff in your email for when you needed it.

Wish I had this when I was travelling in Europe last summer.

Ok, here, give this a shot.... Twenty 320x480 jpg's that you can stick in iphoto, and sync to the iPhone. This gives you the proof-of-concept of how to get this done, you might let the iSubway people know this is the way they should do it for iPhone, at least till Apple lets you import high-res without downsampling...

http://homepage.mac.com/quibbler/subway.zip

(In my experience, however you kinda have to re-order them like a giant puzzle iPhoto doesn't seem to keep them in the right order. Importing row-by-row works best it seems).

Just "installed" zsubway onto my iPhone. Its a series of hundreds of pictures of "bits" of the subway map that sync's through the photo section of iTunes. personally, I find this useless in this format, as I cannot scroll across large swaths of the map, you literally see a small piece of the map and 3 or 4 stops. You have to back up and load a new picture to see where the line continues.

Not intuitive or useful in this format for the iPhone, IMHO.

- Nilay

Aaaarrrgh!!! Stop.

This is a desire to do something that the iPhone is more than capable of doing, but the lock-downs have prevented (or made it tricky). So; we need a workaround until 1.1 or 1.2.

The workaround (I'm working on it and will post it shortly) Take the map in question, and cut it into the 4x5 grid of thumbnail previews. In other words use the photo-album-view as the first level of zoom. The main post suggests a photoshop solution, and thats exactly what it is.

I've run into the same issue myself, but it's not the end of the world. I first uploaded the NYC subway map to my Blackberry Pearl, which my iPhone replaced and resolution was great. Zoomed resolution with the iPhone is poor, but is still readable - I used it just last night.

I've gotten an email from an iPhone user that the maps at http://zsubway.com/ work just fine on the iphone. Can anyone confirm this?