Expanding on last month’s very rough Kindle screensaver experiments, I’ve now put together a real set of ten nice looking close-ups of subway maps from cities around the world and packaged them for use on the Kindle. In order to install any kind of custom screensaver, you’ll need to perform the (very simple) Kindle “jailbreak” hack. Once that’s done, you should just be able to drop the image files into the directory created by the jailbreak.
There are ten cities included in this version, and they’re all systems I’ve ridden and maps I’m familiar with. If you’d like to see another map done in the same style included in a future release, please just send me the place and, if possible, a high res version of the map to work with.
A note on process: All of the images were selected and prepared in GIMP. The fonts I used were League Gothic and Goudy Bookletter 1911, both public domain and freely available at the awesome League of Moveable Type.
To the extent that I own a copyright in these images, I’m releasing them under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license, where attribution can be given by providing a link to this page (http://parkerhiggins.net/2010/12/metro-maps-kindle-screensaver) or to the home page of this site (http://parkerhiggins.net).
7 Comments
Nice! I think I’ll try my hand at a screensaver set when I get a bit of free time. I got a Kindle a few weeks ago, and it’s great, but I do look forward to some better screensavers.
@Sage yeah, it’s not too tricky, and I really like having custom ones over the pre-packaged ones. The biggest challenge is finding or making things that look good at 800×600 and greyscale. I was thinking of making one of some images from Wikimedia Commons, but I haven’t yet found a category I really like for that. Some of the ones on this page could work: https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/w/index.php?title=Category:Illustrations&from=File%3AMapletonindock.jpg
I’m probably going to start here: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Kunstformen_der_Natur
I’m thinking a Dore set will be good, too, although the resolution may cause issues.
Wo, Parker, these are awesome!!!
Thanks! These look great and will be a lot of fun for my wife and I on our nooks.
Here’s what I came up with: http://ragesoss.com/blog/2011/01/15/kindle-screensavers-karl-blossfeldt/
Great set!
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