Maps on a phone

A world map is a canvas you mostly look at, which suits a phone — and partly build, which suits it less. Both work; this page is about which is which.

Getting around

1. Pan — drag with one finger.

2. Zoom — pinch with two fingers.

3. Open the menu — press and hold for about half a second, on a pin, a path, a region or on open map.

The zoom controls and minimap collapse to a single chevron in the corner on a phone, the same as they do on a board. Tap it to expand the column, tap again to put it away — a minimap that permanently occupied a third of a phone screen would cost more than it gave.

The long-press menu

Everything the map does on right-click, it does on a long press: Zoom to, Ping here, Edit, Duplicate, Delete, Move to layer, Hide from players or Reveal to players, and jumps to a linked wiki page or entity where one exists.

On touch it opens as a list rather than the radial ring you get with a mouse. The ring rewards a flick from a held-down button, which is a mouse gesture; a list is what a thumb wants.

If long press does nothing on an iPhone, update the app

Apple’s browser engine has never raised a right-click event from a long press, so the map produces one itself. Until recently that event was being discarded before it arrived — on Android the menu opened anyway, for an unrelated reason, which is how the fault went unnoticed on iPhones for a while. It is fixed; if you are on an older build, update.

Editing with a finger

Dragging pins, dragging the vertices of a path or region, and dragging the parallax and minimap handles all work by touch. If you have tried this on a phone before and found that things simply would not move, that is fixed — the drag loops used to listen for mouse movement, which never happens during a touch drag.

Placing something precisely is still easier zoomed in than zoomed out, on any device. A stylus is a genuine upgrade here if you have one.

The Map Foundry

The Foundry’s panels — presets, layers, history, export and save — open as drawers on a phone instead of side-by-side modals, so each gets the full width while it is open.

For the region brushes, the toolbar has a Paint / Erase pair. On a computer you can also erase by holding Shift or dragging with the right mouse button, and those still work and still win over the toggle for the length of the stroke. A finger has neither a second button nor a modifier key, which is what the toggle is for.

What still wants a bigger screen

Generating a map — steering the terrain sliders, judging a coastline, comparing variations — is a wide-screen job. The controls fit on a phone, but you are making aesthetic judgements about a large image through a small window, and you will second-guess them later. Review a generated map anywhere; generate it somewhere roomy.