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Funny how the hyenas all attacked when the signal strength problem came out with the iPhone 4. Funnier thing is that most, if not all, smartphones have identical problems. At least Apple admitted it and is doing something about it. To see the hard numbers, look here: iPhone Press Conference – Antenna Problems
Highlights of the CMA include:
1) Navigate forwards and backwards without losing data
2) Adding comparables via seven different methods (MLS Numbers, Radius Search, Map Search, Address Search, Advanced Search, MLS Number Search, Saved MLS Numbers)
3) Saving the CMA in progress
4) Printing to PDF, printing to your printer, or e-mail with the touch of a button
5) Reorder your comparables or the pages of your CMA report by dragging and dropping them into the order you desire
6) Incorporate properties that are in different categories (ex: Farms/Ranches + Lots/Lands)
7) Display your recommended price through a graph
8) Customize your report with pages dedicated to Company Information, your Resume, and/or color themes to match your office/team
9) Auto-populate subject property information with Tax ID or previous MLS #
For more information, print out our quick reference guide.
Want a trainer to come out to your office and demonstrate this enhanced functionality? Call our Training Manager, Kerry Meeuwsen at 503-872-8051 or e-mail kerry.m@rmls.com.
Recently, RMLSweb was updated with several new features. One of these features is the ability to view a city or county’s Web page by one simple click of the mouse. In client and agent reports, most city and county names are now links to local Web sites of municipalities for that area.
This can be useful if you have a client who currently lives in Ashland, Oregon, but is interested in buying a home in Portland, Oregon. After performing searches to find an appropriate listing that meets your client’s needs, you can email them a client report and they have the ability to also view the city or county’s Web page for more information.
By looking at the city or county’s Web page, your client can decide if that particular area would be a good fit for their needs. This new feature can also be used by agents who would like to learn more about a particular area in order to educate potential clients.
Take a look at the image below. This listing has links for both the city (Portland) and the county (Multnomah). These links will take the viewer to the official Web site for the city of Portland and to the Multnomah County home page.
How else have you used this new link feature?
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Now, you will no longer have to pay for RMLSweb Mobile. Want to view listing information but you aren’t in your office? Just login to mobile.rmlsweb.com to access a simplified version of our subscriber-only website designed to be used on mobile devices, allowing you to access MLS information while in the field. With the mobile format, which works on almost all mobile web browsers and smartphones, you can:
There isn’t a better price than “free”!
This is a little misleading. While Flash does a great job of streaming video and gives lots more control than HTML5′s video tag, it’s sort of like comparing a kid with a model rocket to the Russian Space Agency. (I used the Russian Space Agency rather than NASA on purpose. They still tend to blow up a lot of stuff, kind of how Flash blows up a lot every time there’s an update.)
Anyway, give HTML5 another year and there will most likely be some AJAX or Javascript technologies out there that will blow Flash away.
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YouTube has some bad news for those of you hoping the site would soon ditch Flash in favor of HTML5 video tags: It isn’t going to happen any time soon.
That’s message from the YouTube developer blog which cites half-a-dozen areas where Flash trumps HTML5 and explains why “the <video> tag does not currently meet all the needs of a site like YouTube.”
The emerging HTML5 standard, which is quickly being adopted by browser manufacturers and developers, offers native video-playback and animation tools that don’t require Adobe’s Flash plug-in. However, while HTML5 handles the basics of video, it lacks many of the extra features that sites like YouTube, Vimeo and Hulu currently offer through Flash-based video players.
To switch to pure HTML5 video would mean YouTube would have to give up features like live streaming, dynamic video quality control and the ability to allow users to jump to specific points in a video.
While YouTube claims to be “excited about the HTML5 effort and <video> tag,” the post makes it pretty clear that HTML5 isn’t going to take over the site any time soon. The video-streaming site Hulu has previously said the same thing: HTML5 lacks the extra features Flash enables.
YouTube has been running an experimental HTML5 version of the site for more than a year, and it remains an opt-in choice for those who want to avoid Flash. The site also continues to serve raw H.264 videos to mobile devices like the iPad, but don’t expect the main browser version of YouTube to make the same changes.
The YouTube developer blog lists several things Flash can do that HTML5 video tags cannot:
YouTube also doesn’t mention a couple of other areas where HTML5 video lags well behind Flash: accessibility and translation tools.
Clearly YouTube isn’t going to abandon Flash just because the web seems to think that’s the cool thing to do at the moment. For those uploading their own videos straight to a blog or similar site, the HTML5 video tag makes sense, but for sites like YouTube and Hulu, the HTML5 video tag still clearly can’t match what Flash has to offer.
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Anyone that is still using Internet Exploder (cough…gag…choke) I highly recommend trying Firefox on windows. Those with a Mac, of course, probably use Safari, though Firefox has some merits on OS X too.
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If you ever doubted Firefox’s add-ons have played a major role in the browser’s success, Mozilla has some staggering numbers to prove you wrong.
The Firefox add-on website recently passed the two billion downloads mark.
That’s more add-ons downloaded than there are people on the web. Of course, that doesn’t mean everyone has add-ons installed — many of us have a dozen or more add-ons installed at any given time — but Mozilla has previously shown that some 150 million add-ons are in use every day.
Of course the word “add-on” is a little vague. Mozilla isn’t just counting web developer favorites like Firebug or YSlow, but also things as simple as Personas themes, which might explain why the numbers are so high. For instance, if you frequently change Personas, you’re downloading a new skin every time, and that drives the numbers up.
UPDATE: The original version of this post incorrectly stated that Mozilla was including individual downloads of Personas in its count. The two billion number is new downloads of extensions and themes since 2005. Personas are not included in the count.
Still, there’s no question that Firefox users love their add-ons, and Mozilla has the McDonalds-esque number to prove it.
If you’re looking to extend Firefox, or just curious about what other people are using, check out the new “Best of 2 Billion Firefox Add-ons” collection Mozilla has posted. There are number of web developer favorites, including the aforementioned Firebug and YSlow, as well as some other must-haves like NoScript, Xmarks and Greasemonkey.
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The next major milestone of the Firefox browser has been released into the wild.
Firefox 4 Beta 1 is now available for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. We were expecting it last week, as Mozilla had initially estimated the first beta would be available in June, but it’s here now. This release is for the adventurous only — it’s the first beta so it’s stable enough, but not rock-solid. So, if you’re eager to get an early peek at the next generation of Firefox, go forth and download.
The thing that probably matters most to everyday users is speed, and after using it for an hour or so, I can report that Firefox 4 is noticeably much faster than the various 3.x builds on my desktop.
Page load times are speeding up substantially across all the browsers now — Chrome and Safari recently received upgrades with hefty speed boosts, the new Opera 10.6 is on par with those releases, and the new Microsoft IE 9, due later this year, is also showing off some impressive speed in its current release, Platform Preview 3. Speed is one area where Firefox has recently drawn low marks, with some users switching to Chrome simply because it’s so nimble. But Firefox 4 appears set to change that when the final version arrives in a few months.
We covered much of what’s new in our Firefox 4 preview in May, but there are two new features in Tuesday’s release.
First, there’s a new look for Windows users. Tabs are now on top by default (a la Chrome). Mac and Linux users will get this feature as a default in subsequent betas. If you want to try it now, just go to View > Toolbars > Tabs on Top to enable it. Windows users, you can switch the option off using the same method if it’s not your thing. Also new for Windows people is the orange “Firefox” button in the top left. Click it and you get a dropdown filled with the most popular application menu items.
The new Firefox button. Click for larger.
The other new feature — and this is for all OSes — is an integrated Feedback button next to the search box. Click it to report anything that Firefox did to “make you happy” or “make you sad” (Mozilla’s actual wording). The Feedback system incorporates the Test Pilot add-on from Mozilla Labs to collect and anonymize the feedback.
Other big stuff in this beta:
Syncing, hardware acceleration and new themes for Mac OS X and Linux are coming soon, probably in the next beta release. So stay tuned.
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I thought it was time we revisited the earlier analysis we did on how home value trends vary by the typical home value of a city. Previously, we found that most metros displayed a pattern in which cities with higher-priced real estate had experienced less decline in home values since the peak of home values in the metro market (relative to cities with lower priced real estate in the same metro).
Returning now to the issue armed with May 2010 data from the Zillow Home Value Index, we find a much more mixed picture in terms of the relationship between prevailing home values at peak and peak-to-current declines in home values. The table below shows the classification of metro regions according to whether the higher-priced cities within the metro have seen more, less or the same degree of decline in home values since the peak in the market.
In the San Francisco metro area, the price level of a city has had a huge impact on how far home values have fallen. At peak, a typical home in Antioch – in Contra Costa County east of the Bay – had a value of $516,000 but home values there have fallen 63% since then. That’s in sharp contrast to Hillsborough – in San Mateo County – where a typical home was valued at almost $2.6 million at peak and home values have declined only 10% since then. Some of this effect is due to the timing of the housing downturn in these two cities. Antioch went into decline before Hillsborough but the former is now seeing positive monthly appreciation (0.9% in May) whereas the latter is still seeing negative appreciation (-0.6% in May). So stay tuned, peak-to-decline values may look quite different than they do today in this market.
Below the table is an interactive chart showing the patterns for each metro region (as an aside, Tableau visualization software is truly remarkable. While we’re an open source R shop for the most part, Tableau has certainly found a place here when visualization of data is needed).
Relationship Between Typical Home Value of City and Total Decline in Home Values Since Peak
Google’s Chrome browser has a well-established reputation for being not only extremely fast at rendering JavaScript, but also robust in its support of cutting-edge HTML5 technologies.
Both of these capabilities are on display at Chrome Experiments, a site that Google set up to showcase some of the coolest demos on the web for JavaScript apps, intricate CSS layouts and animations done with Canvas.
Chrome Experiments now has over 100 demos on offer, and we picked out some of our favorites for this little gallery.
Interest is exploding in HTML5 and its companion technologies. The hope is that these emerging standards will be widely used to power new web apps, as well as for playing animations, songs and videos in the browser without any plug-ins. Developers and content providers continue to rely on plug-ins like Flash or Silverlight for such multimedia playback tasks for now, but they are increasingly turning to HTML5, JavaScript and other web standards as browser makers continue to build the new capabilities into their latest releases.
We tested all of these experiments in multiple browsers, and almost all of them worked in Safari and Firefox, though they performed much better in the latest beta of Firefox 4 than in the current stable Firefox 3.x builds. Some of them also work splendidly in the latest Microsoft pre-release, Internet Explorer 9 preview 3.
Of course, a few of the Chrome demos on the Experiments site use Webkit-specific technologies and CSS prefixes, so those only work in Chrome and Safari. Some have poo-poohed vendor-specific prefixes, and others see them as a necessary step to force browser makers to adopt the latest behaviors being used in the wild. Regardless of that debate, it’s encouraging to see the different browsers all improving their JavaScript capabilities, which all of these demos exploit.
In short, you don’t need Chrome to view these, but they will all be more impressive in Chrome than in other browsers.
Turn off your pop-up blocker and give this game a spin. It’s the console classic, Pong, but played with browser windows — talk about thinking outside the box. We also tried this one in Firefox 4 beta, and it runs great. It also seems a little easier to beat in Firefox than in Chrome for some reason. See more work from Stewart Smith at the Stewdio.
This demo by Sean Christmann shows a short video. But when you click on it, the video breaks into tiny tiles that scatter across the screen. The video keeps playing inside the tiles as they tiles bounce around. After a few seconds, the tiles slide back into place so you can keep on clicking and blowing up the video to your destructive little heart’s content. This is the sort of canvas-based manipulation that HTML5’s native <video> tags allow. Canvas can do this sort of animation with other page elements, but it’s especially impressive to see with video. Sean explains how he does it on his own site. By the way, Firefox doesn’t like this demo very much.
Derek Detweiler’s simple solitaire game Entanglement is an addictive and fun time waster, but it’s also beautifully crafted. It uses subtle canvas animations to spin the hexagonal tiles, and JavaScript to handle the mouse and keyboard controls. Derek has a few other games on his personal site.
This one will conjure memories of playing in the ball pit at the local IKEA. Ball Pool fills up a blank browser window with brightly colored balls. Drag them around, toss them and (this is extra cool) shake the browser to send them flying around. The demo uses box2d-js for all the physics. Ball Pool is one of the rare demos on Google’s site that works exceptionally well in Firefox 4.
The creator, Mr. Doob, is a busy man. Check out the lo-fi and psychedelic Plane Deformations, and the bizarre Multiuser Sketchpad, where you can watch dozens of anonymous wannabe Picassos use JavaScript to draw crude penises in your browser.
Fun with fractals! Ryan Alexander’s experiment takes you inside a vector-graphics tree as it grows. The trees in Canopy can be zoomed in upon infinitely, and you can trigger mutations and blooming cycles, so you can watch leaves grow and fall off, and start new trees. The animation is slick and fast in Chrome, and it’s just as fast in our Firefox 4 beta. Be sure to check out Ryan’s massive JavaScript fractal zoomer on Google Code. And if you like watching computer-generated, canvas-animated trees and flowers bloom, check out PlasmaTree and FlowerPower, both from mhepekka at OpenRise.
Click on the scrollbars to set them in movement. It’s called Wavy Scrollbars for a reason — the bars undulate like a desktop wave machine, smoothly growing and shrinking thanks to toxi’s verletphysics library. This one is by a Russian developer named Andrey. Check out some of his other JavaScript experiments at the389, his personal site.
The Burn Canvas experiment by Krzysztof Pasek utilizes the HTML5 canvas element to create a simple drawing app. The page will “burn” anywhere you point the mouse. If you leave it in one spot or move the mouse around slowly, the burn effect cycles through a series of bright, psychedelic colors. Things get even trippier when you hold down a mouse button, which causes the drawing to melt. Check out Pasek’s other experiments on his site, including a canvas-based Magic Eye 3D image generator. Packaged code for his various HTML5 experiments is available under the GPL free software license.
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