1. Yahoo! Mail + PDF = Happy Map!

    July 08, 2007

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    Yahoo Mail + PDFSo after many comments, I’ve been tinkering with making a downloadable PDF version of the New York City map which will allow you to pan and zoom and I can announce that it’s been a resounding success! There are, however, two small catches.

    The first catch is, you have to email the maps to your iPhone. This means setting up email on your iPhone. I’m not a big fan of iPhone email, to be perfectly honest. Here’s the second catch: unless you’re using Yahoo! Mail, you have to download the map to your iPhone each time. Yahoo! Mail uses an IMAP connection, which gives you the option of actually downloading the attachment to your iPhone, thereby enabling you to access the maps even if you are underground with no service. Therefore, my suggestion is, to email the files as attachments to your Yahoo! Mail connected iPhone*. Good thing is, if you don’t have a Yahoo! Mail account, they’re free.

    Lastly, I was able to make pannable and zoomable maps, but still needed to break the maps down by Borough. That means there’s a Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens and Bronx map. Still, the text is super sharp, you can zoom and pan much easier and, while it’s a bit slow rendering the PDFs, once you’re at full zoom, panning is cake. :)

    Many thanks to Nate for the heads up on this one. Please let me know what you think!

    * It seems that I had to shut down and restart my iPhone before it was recognizing that I had new Yahoo! Mail. Just a heads-up, if you’re experiencing that problem.

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  2. iPhone Maps Are Here!

    July 07, 2007

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    . . . well, so far just the New York City map. (I don’t mind announcing the new design of the site too.)

    the iPhone Map

    I was hoping that all I would have to do for the iPhone Subway Map was to upload one large jpeg of the entire map as blogger Jason Kottke implied (congrats on your newborn son, Jason!) However, the iPhone will resize and reformat any image to its native 320×480 at 160dpi upon import which is fine for most photographs, details and text such as that on a map, particularly a subway map, doesn’t stand a chance. Plus, you only get one level of zoom.

    That said, I had to go ahead and chop up the map into iPhone screen sizes. You can still zoom to get some detail, but the text is still a bit difficult to read.

    Soon I’ll be updating all of the maps on the site to accomodate all screen sizes. Once that daunting task is taken care of (any photoshop savvy people want to help?) I’ll start making new maps . . . hopefully! —Little Bill

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