Comments on: With little fanfare, MTA kinda, sorta goes mobile

By: The Secret Conductor

The Secret Conductor — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 03:15:39 +0000

I think PDF work well for scaling and details. Not sure of any other reason for using them.

I do look forward to the MTA doing something big with their site. It would be a number 1 destination on the web if it was more handy with info… I think going mobile is a good step in the right direction. As for not promoting it, I think they just wanted to give it a test run for a bit. Even if that is not true, I do think it best not to offer it through a press release when their is more to be done with it I think.

By: slappy

slappy — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 18:52:08 +0000

PDF files open fine on my Blackberry Pearl. They may be too big for your network to handle in any convenient way, though. Those maps are big files.

By: Second Ave. Says MTA Mobile App Lacking « Trainjotting

Second Ave. Says MTA Mobile App Lacking « Trainjotting — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 18:21:27 +0000

[...] Ave. Says MTA Mobile App Lacking Posted by TJ under MTA Our subway-obsessed friends at SecondAvenueSagas put the new MTA mobile Website to the test, and find mixed results. The new platform is geared toward giving you train service alerts, [...]

By: Tomás

Tomás — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 10:10:42 +0000

I spotted the link on the days around Christmas day. I think it wasn't available before that date. I posted on my own blog about this issue on December, 29th. The link is here (in Spanish). You're right. There was no press release on this matter. I also tried to access from my cell phone (Sony Ericsson k610i) and works well except for the pdf files. I think it's a first step from the Authority. On the meantime, there's an application to read pdf files, available on this website: http://designtion.com. You have to write the address of the pdf and the application converts to text. I don't like it so much, but it's a help, anyway.

By: Cap'n Transit

Cap'n Transit — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 05:54:30 +0000

I’m guessing that the parts of the website that use PDF files are parts that still haven’t been optimized for mobile readers, so the question is a more general one: why use PDF files on the MTA website at all? I can think of three reasons for a heavy use of PDF files.

First, PDF files are hard to tamper with. But it’s not like people are likely to go distributing counterfeit bus schedules and subway outage notices.

Second, PDF files print more reliably than HTML. But many of the schedules are odd paper sizes, and have to be either shrunk or tiled to print legibly on standard letter paper.

Third, it’s relatively easy to create PDF files from Word documents and Adobe Illustrator. This is the most compelling explanation: that the people who created these maps, schedules and service outages are used to standard WYSIWYG word processing and drawing software, and nobody at the MTA has been able to get them to change to something that’s more web-friendly.

I’d love to see the schedule data available in an actual database that allows for flexible queries (not just the canned queries that the commuter railroads use). I have a program for my Palm that can show me the next five trains or buses leaving on a given route, but it needs to have all the data entered in a particular format.