Creating Free Offline Maps

Have you ever wanted some shiny new maps on your phone, without wasting fees on internet cost or waiting for a snail paced internet signal to be received by your phone? Well, that's a question that I wanted a solution to, and after a little research I found... gMapMaker - the ultimate tool for creating free offline maps.

Okay... so how does this work you ask me? Well, you can check the full details out at MGMaps, however here's a quick breakdown. First,  you use the Map Creation tool, by setting up markers around the area you want a map of. Then you select the zoom levels - for an everyday street map, use the numbers 8-15. Now, you generate the .MAP file, making sure that the type of map is 'Google Road Maps' (note, you can have other map too! Like for example satellite maps, and sat maps with roads overlayed - off course I didn't need anything fancy so just chose the road/street map.)

Now, after creating the .MAP file (which is simply a coordinate of each markers with a description of map type e.g 'GoogleHyb') you have to download gMapMaker (which is downloadable at MGMaps). What basically happens now is that gMapMaker will download 'tiles' for the .MAP file outputting a MGMapsCache folder. Say what?! So, for example, if you download maps for zoom 13, 14 and 15, gMapMaker will download hundreds of little tiles (these are .mgm extensions, but seem to be viewable as .png files). The more zoomed in you are, the more tiles you will need, so hence I may need 400 tiles on zoom 17, and only 1 tile on zoom 1 to display my map.

After you have created the MGMapsCache file, simply ship it to your phone's memory card. Then, download the app from the wap site, install it, and then change some settings (here's a big long explanation from the site) and hey presto, free offline maps on your phone! But before you run off to make a 1-17 zoom map of the world, be warned: downloading satellite images from Google can supposedly get your IP banned for a while - so, I normally get road maps (zoom 6-15) for my city, but fancy maps, egh, 'Google Hybrid' maps on smaller locations where I may need them.

If you're worried that you'll get your IP banned, gMapMaker comes with a proxy that works fine. You can also use Yahoo which will never ban you. But remember: the people who get banned for (supposedly around 24 hours) are downloading hundreds of thousands of satellite tiles. If you are just getting your the road map of France (zoom 6-15) and a satellite map with roads overlayed (Hybrid) of Paris (zoom 8-17) then you'll be fine.

One more bit of advice. If you're like me, and tried to put a zoom 17 road map with 50,000 files on your phone (what was I thinking?), while using your phone as a medium, while not watching your computer or your cat, and if said cat where to disconnect the cable, meaning the memcard got corrupted, which means formatting, which means putting 50,000 files back on again and having an extremely laggy phone then I guess your just like me :D Anyway I learnt my lesson - now I use a MicroSD USB Adapter, and I just put maps on that I would practically check every now and then - the result - a faster phone, and an easier process (it took 10 minutes to put a road map I'd need on my phone.)

So, seriously, I'd suggest not transferring files over your phone using a USB cable. What happens is the phone must continually start downloading and stop downloading. My opinion, use an USB adapter, and the process will speed up tenfold.

Hope this rundown helped.
- Dev