//nedward.org

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 well for images with lots of small text and details.

In search of the optimal iPhone MTA map.

What I wanted, was the abil­ity to view a PDF, or large PNG of the system 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 attach­ments locally on the iPhone. This did work for me, but I found the MTA’s PDF map slug­gish when zoom­ing or drag­ging around. And, I had to drill back through the Mail menus to get to my Yahoo mail account, (as I’m pri­mar­ily a Gmail user).

But, before I could go out and buy a old-​fashioned paper pop-​up map, another solu­tion pre­sented itself:

• File­mark Maker
  File­marks let you store high res images, text files, and PDFs on an iPhone! File­marks let you store much higher qual­ity images than the built in photo application.

File­mark Maker gets around the lim­i­ta­tions out­lined above, by writ­ing files to a temp loca­tion on the device’s HD, by using Safari book­marklets. Then, the files are acces­si­ble in Mobile­Sa­fari. And, because the files are writ­ten to iPhone’s HD, the book­marklets work whether you’re online or not – or whether you’re above ground or not.

Here are the MTA Subway Maps that I used to make book­marklets using this tool:

• Full PDF
• Par­tial PNG - most of Man­hat­tan, South Brook­lyn, and parts of Queens