Last week I touched on the subject of how to use the maps "in the field" and the challenges faced.
Here is a map from the volume of the Napier-Gisborne line. I travelled from Wellington to Gisborne on the 22nd of June and returned to Wellington on the 24th.
From there with a bit of quick work we have got to this type of map as a picture.
Our trip out of Wellington happened to take us along this very route via SH1 which reuses the former NIMT rail corridor from Johnsonville to Tawa.
Essentially on a handheld device you have to lock the rotation because when the map doesn't orientate exactly to the direction you are going in, you have to physically rotate the tablet to suit.
The main improvements are:
- Creating the maps in a Google photo album. Actually this has always been the way I intended to distribute the maps, but many of them have not been published yet. So I plan to move ahead and quickly republish many of the partly completed ones in the new layout shown above.
- Downloading the Google photo album to a handheld device lets you use it offline, outside a coverage area, or if you haven't got a lot of cellular data.
- Putting the navigational markers on the top of each map. This lets you know which direction to swipe in to get the next map for the direction you are travelling in.
Generally I would recommend if you are travelling by road you will probably want a second set of maps of some sort for keeping on the right road. Whilst I publish roads and other landmarks on the map as much as I can, it's impractical to show all the roads where they aren't close to a railway so road navigation is not what the maps are best at.
