This iPod thing ought to be a useful navigation tool.

January 31, 2009 9:42 AM

Is there a good way to carry around maps on an iPod Touch for offline viewing, without jailbreaking the thing? Taking screenshots from Google and transferring them to the iPod is inelegant and unsatisfactory, but I can't find anything in the iTunes store that looks like it will do this. Does anybody know of either an app that I've overlooked or an acceptable hack?
posted by nowonmai to Computers & Internet (11 answers total)

Response by poster: Or indeed does anybody know a good place to get free or cheap pdf maps that work well on the iPod?
posted by nowonmai at 9:43 AM on January 31, 2009

Gizmodo seems to love AirSharing... Their very brief review of it here is pretty glowing even if it is a paid app.
posted by Rendus at 9:44 AM on January 31, 2009 [1 favorite]

Best answer: What exactly are you trying to do, what's your purpose? Asking 'cause I have a Touch and if directions are needed, I just search for them when WiFi is around and Google Maps keeps the directions available even when I'm offline, so they're still within reach.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 9:52 AM on January 31, 2009

Response by poster: My immediate purpose is I'm off to Philadelphia in a few hours and it would be nice to have a street map to carry around; also it would have been nice to have had a slightly more zoomable version of the route map between NYC and Frederick, MD last week as we suffered from insufficient detail at times. I'll experiment with Google Maps but it would need to be caching a couple of zoom levels to do what I want. (If I knew ahead of time where I would want to go then keeping the directions as you suggest sounds like a great tip).
(On preview - I have no wifi access where I am know, but the Maps app does seem to remember a fair amount from las time I sued it. Nice one.)
posted by nowonmai at 10:09 AM on January 31, 2009

Response by poster: "used" not "sued". Why do I always make my typos whilst adding things in preview?
posted by nowonmai at 10:11 AM on January 31, 2009

Philadelphia, if I recall correctly, is one of the cities with city-wide free WiFi, no?
posted by rokusan at 11:17 AM on January 31, 2009

And Airsharing is great, yeah. I use it for PDFs.
posted by rokusan at 11:18 AM on January 31, 2009

Re: Rokusan's comment. Philadelphia was supposed to get city-wide free WiFi, but Earthlink screwed the project up and it was never finished.
posted by eisenkr at 11:33 AM on January 31, 2009 [1 favorite]

Find a map of an area you want using Google Maps on the iPod Touch. Press both buttons at the same time. Look in your photos and you'll see the screenshot you just took.
posted by mohrr at 1:53 PM on January 31, 2009

Yes, two ways: 1) email it to yourself as a PDF and view the attachment, and 2) bookmarklets as PDFs (I did this in france and it was a lifesaver).

http://pimm.wordpress.com/2007/07/18/how-to-read-pdf-files-on-iphone-via-safari-instead-of-lame-email-attachments/

http://blogs.oreilly.com/missingmanuals/blog/2007/07/reading_books_on_the_iphone.html
posted by Señor Pantalones at 3:00 PM on January 31, 2009

Response by poster: I guess I didn't ask my question very well; what I wanted was (a) a program that does exactly what I want or (b) a good source of maps to transfer to the iPod to carry around. I wasn't so much asking how to transfer images to the iPod, as where to get good map images for the purpose in the first place. So only Brandon's answer was in any way useful. I might ask the question again more coherently on a weekday.
posted by nowonmai at 8:40 PM on March 2, 2009