Get web pages renderer by your least favorite browser without having it installed, IE NetRenderer.
Looks handy but not actually that helpful for us since all our development happens on our internal network which is not externally accessible.
For later reading…
A Critical Assessment of the Traditional Real Estate Broker Commission Rate Structure [pdf] (via Greg)
Listed Green - the MLS for Green, Sustainable, Energy Efficient Homes and Developments Worldwide.
Sadly, only two listings in Seattle. If I were them I’d hold off charging a listing fee until they got a little more popular.
Trulia Hindsight is a pretty neat method of visually building trends.
What I wonder about is why they used Microsoft’s Virtual Earth for Hindsight and yet use Google Maps for their main search site. Anyone know?
We’ve certainly debated the merits of each but our conclusions are likely biased since we’ve only done a really deep dive on Virtual Earth. It would be great to hear how they feel after implementing sites with both.
For later reading…
Dustin wonders what the Consumer Benefits of a Statewide MLS would be.
To me at Redfin the consumer benefit would be that instead of us spending an inordinate amount of time dealing with ~15 different MLSes (each with different data feeds, standards, schemas and points of contact) so that we can provide inventory up and down the west coast of California we could instead invest in more consumer oriented features because we saved all this time by only having to integrate one MLS.
Rain City Guide had a recent post on signs, Go Dog Go! and I thought it would be a good opportunity to post a picture of a sign just down the street from me. First a quote from the RCG post:
The vast majority of the “for sale” signs in my neighborhood, are the usual boring rectangular shape and size. It’s sad because the most interesting yard signs in my neighborhood are from Redfin (memorable because of its non-rectangular shape and the BUY ME “button” on the sign) and from Plateau Real Estate, a small & local company down the street from me, (memorable because it’s logo has gradient greens and a unique font). It’s not like Redfin’s logo and Plateau’s signs are that great, but at least they try to stand out amidst an ocean of boring, rectangular, monochromatic signs from most of the big and independent brokers in the area.
And here’s a photo of our sign in front of a condo building:
Note that we have two styles. One style says ‘BUY ME’ the other ‘FOR SALE’.
Sadly it has been graffiti-ed but everything is on Capitol Hill. I just noticed that someone tagged the brick entryway to the garage of my condo.
What I like most about our sign is its non-standard shape and that it has a very clean design with minimal clutter. I remember when we were working on the design and had the first prototypes shipped to the office and everyone gathered around to try hanging it on the post in the office. Should the swoop by on the top? the bottom? Does it look too much like a guillotine? Which way should the swoop go? Should we make the BUY ME look more like a button? Or leave 2D like the rest of the sign? Should the post be white, grey or red?
In the future I hope we can be more Bloodhound like and include unique URLs on every sign.
Wow, Apple announced today at WWDC 2007 that Safari 3 is coming to Windows. This is an interesting move in so much that it will force developers to take the Safari browser that much more seriously given its potential increased reach.
Previously it was too easy for developers large and small to say that Safari is only 5% of customers let’s just ignore those 5% instead of supporting them. For us, we didn’t want to ignore them because 5% of your user base at a startup is very important but we had to because of some partner choices we made.The good news is that both of our partners who do not support Safari already had plans to support Safari before this announcement.
The other thing I really like about this announcement is that Apple is really boastful about their JavaScript performance. From Engadget’s Steve Jobs live from WWDC 2007:
I would love to see the other browser’s step up and start to compete not just on features but on performance. There is only so much we can do as app developers to make our apps speedy.
If you want to try out Safari 3 with Redfin you will need to make us think it is Firefox. Go to the debug menu and change your user agent to be Firefox 2.0.0.2. To enable the debug menu on Windows you need to (thanks to our Mac dev Sasha for digging into Windows for this tip :) ):
Please note that while it sort of works there are some quirks.
Update: Redfin now supports Safari 3. Yay!