The Japanese railway map available in the “World Transit Maps” app has evolved to a “tiled format (v2)” that follows the example of general map apps and loads only the displayed area at any given time.
Get rid of the “sluggish,” regain our former experience!
The tile method, which uses small map images laid out over a large area, downloads image data from the Internet and displays it each time you scroll. While it is easy to use as there is no need to download it in advance, it also has the disadvantage that the map you scroll to may not be displayed immediately depending on the communication environment.
After the update, we received some harsh feedback that the app was “slower than before,” so it was urgent for the development team to improve the product.
Previously, this app used a “download method” in which large route maps divided by area were downloaded in advance. Although downloading was required at the beginning, the image was loaded from the device’s storage when viewing, which had the advantage of allowing smooth scrolling regardless of the environment.
The latest version includes a “tile cache” that stores tile images of an area that has been displayed on the screen once in a temporary storage location on the device. When the same area is displayed again, the cache is loaded without communication, improving the perceived speed. Scrolling and zooming in and out increases the amount of cache stored, providing an experience similar to that of the conventional method.
Tile cache is automatically turned on in apps updated to version 8.3.0, and no settings are required. In order to balance with our policy of always providing the latest route maps, cached images are deleted after a maximum of 24 hours. For those who want to save on packet communication costs as much as possible, we recommend that you also take advantage of the “offline map” function that will be released at the same time.
Install
Supported Versions
To use the above, update your app “World Transit Maps” to version 8.3.0 or higher (for both Android and iOS).
Countries and regions where maps are provided in the app “World Transit Maps”
Asia
- Japan (v2)
- South Korea
- Taiwan (v1)
- Hong Kong (v1)
- Macau (v1)
- Thailand
- Malaysia
- Singapore
Europe
- United Kingdom
- France
North America
- United States
*(v1) supports “tile method (v1)”, (v2) “tile method (v2)”, and no mark “download method”.