1. Yahoo! Mail + PDF = Happy Map!

    July 08, 2007

    12 Comments | Trackback

    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.

  2. 12 Responses to “Yahoo! Mail + PDF = Happy Map!”

    1. Marc says:
      July 9th, 2007 at 9:50 am

      I believe you can also bring it into iPhoto and then sync it to your iPhone.

    2. Little Bill says:
      July 9th, 2007 at 6:07 pm

      Marc, I think IPhone resizes the PDFs to iPhone screen size, wrecking the scalability. I’ll give it a shot, though.

    3. Mike says:
      July 9th, 2007 at 8:10 pm

      I made a smartplaylist of all my .pdf booklets in iTunes and set that to sync to my iPhone. iTunes didn’t give me an error saying it couldn’t be synced (like my Apple TV does), but the files (and playlist) doesn’t appear on my iPhone.

      That would’ve been perfect if we could put the .pdf into iTunes and sync it across.

    4. Mike says:
      July 13th, 2007 at 2:17 pm

      I’m at work, so I can’t test this, but has anyone tried this:
      http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20070706141839286

      It is very similar to what I was trying to do with my previous comment, and what Marc was saying. Saving PDF to iPhoto and syncing.

    5. iPhoneFan » Archivo del Blog » Mapas del metro para tu iPhone says:
      July 16th, 2007 at 10:43 pm

      [...] ¿Como pasarlo al iPhone? una de las opciones es un JPG que podras pasar como imagen, la segunda es enviarlo en formato PDF por email a tu iPhone y descargarlo con la aplicación Mail cada que quieras consultarlo; la tercera es la mas intersante utilizar el servicio de Yahoo Mail que te permite descargar al iPhone el PDF del mapa. [...]

    6. Nedward.org says:
      July 31st, 2007 at 3:07 am

      MTA Subway Map for iPhone…

      Since I bought my iPhone on June 30, I’ve been looking for an easy, high-quality method for viewing the MTA Subway map. The phone’s built-in Photo application “optimizes” all photos and images down to a dimension and resolution that doesn’t work…

    7. Mikey says:
      September 19th, 2007 at 3:17 pm

      this is amazing, thanks so much. you need to get philadelphia next for the iPhone.

    8. MTA Subway Map for iPhone at //nedward.org says:
      October 2nd, 2007 at 9:51 pm

      [...] map – and to be able to zoom in and drag it around easily. Bill at iSubwayMaps.com outlined one such solution, which involved setting up a Yahoo! mail account, since IMAP mail accounts seemed to cache [...]

    9. Will Wiriawan says:
      October 7th, 2007 at 1:45 am

      I found an alternative solution that is rather simple but working rather nicely.

      If you have Installer.app and have Books.app installed, you can SSH and upload the folders containing map files to the eBooks home folder, I first resized the images to 160dpi, though it only pans but not zoom, I was able to read the maps.

    10. Mike says:
      April 10th, 2008 at 7:15 am

      Any other IMAP account also works perfectly fine. Thanks for the great maps!

    11. Norman says:
      October 24th, 2008 at 11:15 am

      Hey, can you do this for the Paris Metro? I’d speak highly of you forever…

      I’m a student here and the system’s very easy to figure out, but I always have my ipod touch with me, and to have a one-image, zoomable map would be indispensable. Are you planning to do this for other big cities?

    12. Rachel says:
      October 29th, 2008 at 2:59 pm

      Your PDF map looks great, but there’s one problem I haven’t been able to solve: I sent the PDF to myself using my Yahoo mail account and then opened the attachment on my iPhone. But when I try to double-click, it doesn’t zoom as it’s supposed to. Any suggestions on how to make this work? Thanks!

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