Filed under: Odds and ends, iPhone
NYC Subway maps for iPhone
This post will initially have a limited audience--residents of New York City--but I think the idea behind it is interesting enough that other folks might benefit as well. Khoi Vinh has whipped up a cool NYC subway map for the iPhone that takes advantage of the iPhone's thumbnail system for photos. Basically, he's cut up the MTA subway map in such a way that you can pan across the map with the forward and back buttons. The map tiles also overlap a little bit on all sides to make panning more natural. So taking this idea, apparently originally borrowed from Mike Essl, I figured other iPhone aficionados might well whip up similar maps for their own particular circumstances.[via MacVolPlace]
![TUAW [Cafepress]](http://www.blogsmithmedia.com/www.tuaw.com/media/tuaw-cafepress-promo.png)
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
am said 10:05AM on 8-29-2007
the mta offers its subway map as a PDF. can someone explain why this is better?
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Invader J said 10:22AM on 8-29-2007
Because navigating the 600kb PDF on the iPhone is slow as molasses in the middle of winter.
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Slevin said 10:37AM on 8-29-2007
Try putting the NYC Subway map as a PDF on your iPhone it is just too big to be seen as one file even if you have it as an attachment in an email
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Joo said 10:38AM on 8-29-2007
I did the same thing with the Washington, DC subway maps. I created the larger map, cut it up into 4 sections, and sync'd the images to my iPhone.
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andy said 11:11AM on 8-29-2007
http://www.littleapplescripts.com/splittingimage.html SplittingImage was pretty cool, but doesnt seem to have been updated for a while....
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PSM said 12:01PM on 8-29-2007
This is one of the things keeping me from the iPhone long-term if there's not a solution. Viewing the map as a single large image is no problem at all on my Treo or just about any PDA I've ever owned ever! While this solution is clever, we shouldn't have to jump through these hoops. Remember before you could drag Google Maps around and had to hit the arrow keys at the edges to pan? Remember how hard it was sometimes to follow the path to your destination? That's what it will be like. Right this very minute I can drag the entire NYC subway map around with my finger, in full resolution and zoom in and out at will. Isn't this exactly the sort of activity the iPhone is supposed to excel at? Apple should be embarrassed that people have to resort to this kind of solution.
To be honest, my map isn't that big of a file, it's a GIF of about 200kb or so, roughly 1000x1200. Can the iPhone really not handle this, or is it the problem with the resolution getting reduced?
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Gabe said 12:39PM on 8-29-2007
Actually, what should have been done is the following.
Download the PDF from the MTA, resize it so that the file is in the 50-100kb range and e-mail it to yourself as an attachment. I have a folder on my .mac account called maps and I keep maps in there, take them where ever I go. Done and done! You can zoom, pan, just like it was meant to be, none of this photo switcheroo crizap! (I think that's how Snoop Dogg says crap?)
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Gabe said 12:58PM on 8-29-2007
or you could just bookmark the map pages in safari and just go there, loads like a charm, and since you would most likely be in the city where you need the map, there should be a fast data connection, no country EDGE. Why waste 2.5mb on this map when you could add one more song!
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periqueblend said 2:20PM on 8-29-2007
I really hope that someone does this for SFMuni. Currently the design, UI and functionality of their transit map is teh sux. A bonus would be the live train/bus map which shows where the buses are.
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jack said 3:35PM on 8-29-2007
Gabe: in DC the bookmark idea won't work unless you're above ground. AT&T has no coverage in the underground stations. While the DC Metro's online map loads fine via WiFi, it's a tad slow (!) on EDGE.
I did a DC version of this idea and posted it here.
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jack said 3:37PM on 8-29-2007
Sorry, the link didn't come through for the DC version. It's at http://www.barse.org/?p=647
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Aap!Global said 9:02PM on 8-29-2007
Tokyo, JR Tokyo + Santiago + San Francisco Maps @
http://blog.aapglobal.com/2007/08/29/subway-system-maps-for-your-iphone-tokyo-sf-santiago-more/
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waffffffle said 1:52AM on 8-30-2007
All of you talking about bookmarking the PDF are obviously not from New York. There is no cell service in the subway. I had used the data: bookmark hack to store the map PDF and timetables but that slowed down my bookmark sync with iTunes tremendously.
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