On its first use, the app shows an empty city list, as confirmed by a message.

Your next step is to tap on to receive a full list of the cities available (this action requires an active Internet connection).

Every time a process may be taking some time to complete, a wait spinwheel is displayed and animated. Your device is never "locked" and will always allow for a phone call to get through, for example.

The app taps our servers to get databases on your iPhone/iPod. This ensures that you have anytime access to all the cities available and that you may always get the latest updates.

If you worry about the data exchange, we guarantee that we never transmit nor store any personal data coming from your device.

If you receive an error when you try to connect, you should check your network configuration, within the iPhone "Settings" app:

• Check that it is not in "flight" mode,
• Or that the WiFi connections is activated.

Upon reception from our servers, the list of cities available for Métro is displayed. A "flash" icon indicates that the file is not installed and must be downloaded before use (vs. a local file, which has action buttons, & ).

As of the current version, only ASCII files are supported. Other encodings (cyrillic, chinese, japanese...) will be added in the future.

In the list, select the city you want to use (you may navigate faster with the index on the right side).

To download a city, just press its name in the list.

Downloading a city may take some time, especially if you have a slow connection. Yes, once again, an Internet connection is required to download a city. The "wait spinwheel" may thus remain on screen several seconds.

However, from this point, no connection is needed anymore for most operations. City files are stored on your device and you can direcly access all the cities you have installed without any conection to our servers.

If everything went well with the previous steps, you are now on the app main screen and the window title reminds you of the city you have "opened".

It is now time to effectively use the app and search for your first route with the public transportation system of the city you have selected...

You may return to the city list at any time, using the button, at the top left corner of the screen. There, you will see all the cities you have installed.

As explained above, you can get the list of all cities available with the button.

Other options are also available for cities that have been installed:

• to remove a city from your device.
• to search for and, if necessary, install an updated version of the selected city.
• to search for and install, if necessary, updated versions of all the cities present on your iPhone/iPod.

Special versions of some cities (e.g. Berlin, New York and Paris), labelled "Works", "Travaux" or "Bauarbeiten" include short-term disruptions and are updated very frequently.

Their use is recommended only if you don't mind updating them at regular intervals (at least once a week in most cases).

To compute a route, you must first provide your starting point and your destination.

One option is to simply enter stop names in the fields at the top of the screen (with green and red flags). You don't have to bother with accents or special characters (or even whitespace), the program will recognize the names anyway.

Use the "Next" key from the iPhone keyboard to switch from the first field to the second or just tap on the fields with your finger to select one of them.

To run the calculation, press the "Route" key on the keyboard, when you have entered your destination, or the "compute" button .

If you are not sure of a stop name, the "stop" button (in the lower left side of the screen) lets you select it from a complete list.

The "stop list" shows a complete of stops and POIs available in the current city, with POIs in bold.

The index on the right side lets you scroll quickly through the list. When you have found what you are looking for, select the stop and it will fill the currently selected field (the one with the blue ring).

When you are done with your selection, you can run the calculation with the "compute" button .

When you enter stop names with the keyboard, a special list will appear. It contains all the stops that match the characters you enter (ignoring accents, special characters and whitespace).

You can scroll the list to select the stop you are looking for. When you tap on one stop name, it fills the currently selected field and the keyboard is hidden.

When you are done with your selection, you can run the calculation with the "compute" button .

If you have activated the "Location services" option in the iPhone "Settings" app, you can compute a route from or to your current location.

Press the "My location" button to set a special stop name ("My Location") in the currently selected field.

This function is available (and the button active) only for cities where geographic coordinates are included (36 cities at the time of this writing).

The app also keeps a history of the last 10 stops or POIs used in a route, accessible by tapping twice on the "Stops" button .

As in the complete list, tap on a stop name to select it as your start point or destination.

When you run a calculation, after a short delay, your route is displayed with all the necessary details.

As in all versions of Métro , you get the quickest route and, when appropriate, the route with the minimum number of changes.

The route "title" provides some general information, such as the estimated trip time, the number of stops and changes.

With cities including geographic coordinates, you have the option to compute a route from or to a street address.

To do so, just prefix your entry with an '@' and type the complete address (with the city name). As soon as you enter the '@' character, a list of the last 20 used addresses is displayed and you can just select one of them.

The button displays detailed information on the address you have entered, including a map that lets you check that its location has been correctly found.

Once an address has been geolocated, it is stored and it is then possible to reuse the last 20 saved addresses without connecting again to the network.

When the start point or destination is an address, the program will look for the closest stops within the same range as for the "My Location" feature (which you can set in the Preferences, see below). If no stop is found within this range, the single closest stop within about 5 km will be used.

Address geocoding is provided by Google Maps, any error with this feature should be reported directly to Google.

Within the route results, you may notice that every text line with an icon can be selected. This gives you access to more details about the corresponding stop or line:

• For a line, you get a detailed list of all stops you will get through.
• For a stop, you get a list of nearby POIs and stops (where a change is possible) and all lines going through (see the screenshot).
• For a POI, you get information about the place (when available) and a list of nearby stops.

The "Information" button provides the same kind of information for the currently selected field.

Whenever the geographic coordinates are available in our databases, the detailed information also includes a map of the surroundings.

This feature requires an active Internet connection.

By default, the app searches a route for the current day and time. But in many cities, the public transportation services change depending on the day of the week and the time of the day. If you want to compute a route for a different period, tap on the "day and time" button (on the right of the actions buttons row).

In the dialog that appears, select the desired day and time and press "OK".

The program takes your choice into account everywhere: for the route calculations, for the line list and for the line route details (see below)...

The "Lines" button display a list of public transportation systems and lines available in the current database.

In almost all the cities, the system and line names are accompanied by an icon representing the type of transportation (subway, railway, bus, tram, trolley, ferry...), painted in its assigned color (if relevant).

Lines that are not running at the selected day and time are grayed out in the list (e.g. "Line 5 Special Service" in the screenshot, which runs only at peak times, not at 12PM).

If you tap on one of the "groups", the list is filtered to show only the individual lines comprised within this group (in the screenshot, the "Subway" group has been selected).

Press again on the group name to revert to the full list.

When you tap on a line name, you get a description of the line route, with all its stops.

The icon preceding every stop name shows whether the stop is served in one way or both.

The checkbox that appears before the group and stop names shows whether the group or stop is "activated". Check or uncheck the box to change the group or line status.

When a line is deactivated, it is not used when computing a route. When a group is deactivated, all its lines are deactivated (and therefore not used for a route calculation).

When a group is deactivated, the checkbox before every line included in this groupe is in an "undetermined" state and its individual status cannot be changed. On the screenshot, the "PATH" group has been deactivated and all PATH lines are unavailable.

The program saves your choice of group activations (not for individual lines) and will restore that choice whenever you run the app.

The "Preferences" button in the main screen lets you set a few general parameters:

• Select if you prefer to get the route with the minimum number of changes first when 2 results are available.
• When using the location services or street addresses, you can select the maximum distance to search for a stop from your location or from the given address.

The main screen offers a few additional options:

• "About Métro" shows general information about the program and the current city. You should check that information out every time you install a new file.
• "Cities" brings you back to the city list.
• "Return route" exchanges the start point and destination and immediately runs a calculation for your return route.
• "Reset" clears the screen contents and reset the day and time to their current values.

If you don't want to install Métro  on your iPhone or iPod Touch, you may still use i-Métro , our online version.

For this, you have 3 different options (they have all been tested on an iPod Touch):

• The "classic" i-Métro: feature-complete (including mapping in some cities) but it is not optimized at all for small screens. Just point the iPhone browser to http://imetro.nanika.net.
   
• The "mobile" i-Métro: better adapted to small screens but it has less features than the other versions. Just point the iPhone browser to http://i-metro.mobi.
   
• The recommended Netvibes Métro widget (illustration on right): feature-rich and optimized for the iPhone with the dedicated Netvibes portal page. To use the widget, you must setup a free account on Netvibes, add i-Métro to your personalized home page and point your iPhone browser to the iPhone version of Netvibes