Sunday, August 16, 2009

Five Best Apartment Search Tools [Hive Five]

Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/lifehacker/full/~3/oPHuUYChooc/five-best-apartment-search-tools

Gone are the days when the only place to find apartment listings was the back of a newspaper. Now you can find conduct apartment searches of all sorts online, and its almost always packed with additional photos, video, and information.

Photo by cincyproject.

Earlier this week we asked you to share your favorite ways to find apartments. We've tallied up the votes and now we're back to showcase the five most popular tools you use to find yourself some new digs.

HotPads


HotPads approaches apartment search in a novel way. In additional to offering the basic city/price searches found in any apartment search engine, HotPads has heat maps. When you search for apartments with HotPads, you can overlay heat maps of various data onto the map like population density, household income, median age, median rent, and foreclosure data. The heat maps give you a view of your future neighborhood that a simple apartment listing can't. In addition to the heat maps, each listing has a breakdown of how the price of the listing you're looking at compares to others in the zip code, city, county, and state. You can search HotPads for apartments as well as use it to search for a room to sublet or a roommate to sublet a room from you.

PadMapper / Craigslist

Craiglist is a popular destination among Lifehacker readers searching for apartment listings, but it isn't the most feature packed apartment listing tool. Fortunately PadMapper takes the spartan listings on Craiglist and aggregates them into a Google Maps mashup. You can search PadMapper just like you would Google Maps, and every pushpin in the map is an apartment listing. PadMapper results can be filtered by price, bedrooms, bathrooms, and pets. If you're already using Craiglist to do your apartment searching, PadMapper will put an extra zing to your search.

Apartments.com


Apartments.com is a veteran of the apartment search field. Their color-coded neighborhood maps will jog a few memories even if you haven't been apartment searching for some time. They don't have the flashiest site in the market, but thanks to being one of the original players in the online apartment-search field, they've got an absolutely enormous pool of listings. Nearly every listing has a photo tour and a significant number of them have 360° virtual tours. The color-coded maps are quite useful if you're unfamiliar with the layout of the city you're browsing in and help you quickly drill down from region to individual neighborhood. Apartments.com also has an iPhone app which combines the listings at Apartments.com with the GPS chip in the iPhone to create a location-aware apartment search tool. Love the neighborhood you're driving through? Hit a button in the iPhone app and see if anything is availa! ble.

MyApartmentMap

MyApartmentMap has quite a slew of features beyond simply indexing apartment listings. You can jump to Google Streetview to check out your new neighborhood, browse an interactive map of local businesses and social spots, and get rental data for your new city and neighborhood to compare the prices of the apartments your looking at to the city averages—a rather handy feature if you're moving to a city with a market you're unfamiliar with. You can also search by colleges to see listings for off-campus housing surrounding that college in addition to searching by city and neighborhood. If you don't find anything you like, you can set up email and RSS alerts to be notified when listings that fit your requirements appear. MyApartmentMap pulls listings from Craigslist (like PadMapper) as well as a variety of other online resources.

Pounding the Pavement

As awesome as scouring the internet for a new pad can be, the whole world hasn't been digitized. That cool little apartment over a garage in a scenic Victorian neighborhood you just love probably won't ever make an appearance on a huge apartment aggregation site. Sometimes you just have to hit the streets, ask questions, and see what turns up. As we pointed out in our guide to apartment hunting, the greatest apartments often never advertise beyond putting out a "For Rent" sign because they don'! t have t o; people flock to the best neighborhoods looking for them. Photo by Rodrigo Cayo.

Now that you've had a chance to look over the contenders for the title of best apartment search tool, it's time to cast your vote to see which tool will be crowned king of the pad-finding-castle.


Best Apartment Search Tool?(polls)


Have a tool we didn't list? Shocked that scouting-via-airplane wasn't considered? Sound off in the comments with your apartment finding tips, tricks, and tools.



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Posted by Augustine at 4:25 PM

CRISTAL: Control Your Living Room By Dragging, Dropping, Swiping a Surface Table [Multitouch]

Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/gizmodo/full/~3/rivJC_AheuM/cristal-control-your-living-room-by-dragging-dropping-swiping-a-surface-table

CRISTAL is a research project that moves the universal remote to a Microsoft Surface-type table with incredibly intuitive gestures. Want to watch a movie? Drag the cover to your TV. It even lets you trace a path for your Roomba.

The awkwardly-acronymed CRISTAL, which stands for ""Control of Remotely Interfaced Systems using Touch-based Actions in Living spaces," uses a camera to take an overhead shot of your living room setup, and you designate the compatible parts: TV, speakers, digital photo frame, HTPC, Roomba. Then you simply touch, swipe, drag and drop to control the room. Your digital media collection shows up as almost a Cover Flow-type design, and can be dragged either to the speakers or TV, or just examined more closely on the Surface-type screen itself. I love that you can watch a preview right there on the table, or quickly toss it to the TV to output it.

The system, right now, would cost a prohibitive $10,000-15,000, but the team says costs could definitely be lowered. Presumably they're not using an actual Surface, which costs about that much by itself. Still, it looks awfully responsive and just a blast to play with, so we hope they can figure out a way to get those costs down enough that, say, I can get one. [Wired]




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Posted by Augustine at 7:33 AM

HTC Hero "Sense" UI Officially Coming to the Magic, MyTouch 3G Might Be Left in the Cold [Android]

Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/gizmodo/full/~3/ORyICJol-GA/htc-hero-sense-ui-officially-coming-to-the-magic-mytouch-3g-might-be-left-in-the-cold

The HTC Magic is getting an official update to the Hero's overhauled, fairly wonderful "Sense" UI, but there's a catch: the T-Mobile MyTouch 3G, which is basically the same freakin' phone, probably won't get the update, for lame licensing reasons.

To be fair, we should have expected this: Back in June, there were reports that HTC representatives had been talking about a licensing issue that would keep any proprietary modifications off of phones with "With Google" branding. Sense is all HTC, and the MyTouch 3G is slapped with a Google logo, so this forthcoming update, which was announced at a press conference in Taiwan and will be available from HTC's website at some point in the near future, sounds like a distinctly foreign interest.

It's worth holding out for possible "clarifications" on this one—please, HTC, Google, or both, say something! Soothe us!—but this hemisphere's outlook isn't so great. Enjoy turning your Magics into Heroes for free, Eurojerks. At least we've got our homebrew.

Update: Another possible issue: The MyTouch 3G and Vodafone-labeled Magics have slightly less RAM than their HTC-branded counterparts, which means even the best hacked Hero ROMs don't run especially well. Yeah, not looking so great for ol' MyTouch here. [ePrice—Thanks, Taknarosh and Nick!]




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Posted by Augustine at 7:32 AM

Xbox Micro makes the Wii look overweight

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2009/08/15/xbox-micro-makes-the-wii-look-overweight/

Welcome to Micro Saturday at Engadget! In the absence of hard hitting stories and shocking exposés, we thought we'd turn to the lighter -- and thinner -- side of the news. Enter the Xbox Micro, a 1-inch thick celebration of all that is good and holy about the world of DIY mods. It took six months to make, with a few clever design decisions along the way, but it looks good enough to make even the ninja-black Wii suck its gut in. Comparison pics with the original behemoth are after the break, and hit the read link to see the exposed guts of this little beauty.

[Thanks, Matt and Jesse]

Continue reading Xbox Micro makes the Wii look overweight

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Xbox Micro makes the Wii look overweight originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 15 Aug 2009 16:08:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Posted by Augustine at 7:22 AM

WD TV-2 spruces up Western Digital's already attractive media player offering

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2009/08/16/wd-tv-2-spruces-up-western-digitals-already-attractive-media-pl/

Western Digital really hit a sweet spot last year with its $130 WD TV HD Media Player. The thing pumped out 1080p over HDMI at an attractive price, and that's all most people really needed. The newly leaked WD TV-2 revisits the formula, but adds in network playback over the new Ethernet jack, DTS audio decoding, and a component video plug for folks caught in the technological no man's land between composite and HDMI. Outside of that there's a just plain silly amount of codec support, which is hard not to love. No word on price or a release date, but the leaked photos and detailed specs seem to imply this thing is ready for prime time.

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WD TV-2 spruces up Western Digital's already attractive media player offering originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 16 Aug 2009 02:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Posted by Augustine at 7:21 AM

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