CRT’s communications
I attended the Inman Connect conference in San Francisco last week. I’m always amazed at the quality of this gathering. Just walking between sessions, you get a great opportunity to talk to most of the industry power players in the MLS scene.
An east cost Inman connect was held in New Yrok earlier this year, but I could not attend for medical reasons. Next year there will be four venues; San Francisco, New York, Miami and London. I wonder if I can swing the UK? Probably not.
Users derive opinions of software largely based on the display. Eventhough I have no data points to back this up, I have dedicated many hours in my career to working with users.
Brilliant software can go unappreciated simply because the color scheme is poor. Complex projects are routinely shown to users during the development cycle to verify that the business impact is being captured correctly. Typically, these “shows” are hastily orchestrated and underdeveloped User Interfaces are presented. The results are underwhelming.
Conversely, really bad software can gain amazing loyalty with a “catchy” user interface. I was fortunate to be in technology during the “dot-com” era and believe me, many of the “investments” were based on barely functional software that looked good. After a couple of years, the train left the station leaving all sanity behind.
Call me a cynic, but pretty UI signals deeper problems in software. It takes years and many versions for pretty programs to work as good as they look. This is a fact of life though and I have come to accept it.
The value of goods are derived from its utility to the user, not the labor spent in producing it.
Jean-Baptiste Say
French Economist
1767-1832
Most of the Open Source community does not look at the world the same way that I do. They do not appreciate the importance of the User Interface. Although talented (an under statement), they need to begin building tools for the non-technical user.
Firefox are tagged (no pun intended) by developers as having “poor table handling”. When writing web applications, tables in Internet Explorer (IE) may look differently than when rendered with FireFox. This is a frustrating situation for both develoeprs and consumers.
In reality, IE and Firefox read the same HTML but render it differently. Firefox renders tables exactly as you present it. If the HTML is not well formed, it shows. Commonly, the culprit is a missing or extra TR and/or TD tags. On the other hand, IE “fixes” broken HTML.
In my opinion browsers that read my code and “fix” it automatically weakens the discipline of software development by allowing poor practices to pass. Website development is difficult enough when you consider the Javascript issues. Don’t contribute to the problem with poor coding practices.
CRT is working on a number of new RETS clients.
Retriever is the most popular RETS tool offerred by CRT right now. Written in PHP, Retriever allows your website to display listings as a Transient Download. This means that a copy of the listing data is not written to the disk operated by the web server. All rendering is performed by Retriever with either a Summary, Detail or Gallery view.
This approach works for some, but others wanted to control their own rendering. What is needed to support more control is a Persistent Download approach. This is where VieleRETS comes in.
VieleRETS is written with the same RETS client code found in Retriever, but replaces the rendering engine with a persistance engine. Listings can be stored in either CSV, XML, RDB or OR (Open-Realty) formats. Although both the RDB and OR options write to relational databases, the format of the tables are different. The RDB option writes all listing to a single table whereas the OR format stores information in a meta approach. OR uses one table for defining the fields for the site and another for actually storing the information.
Open-Realty is a very cool Open Source package that can be used to support Agent and Brokers websites. Features include multiple Agent support and the ability to add more information than is found in the MLS feed. Consumers can set up accounts and store searches making OR an full featured website for Real Estate.
VieleRETS can be used to populate the RDB that drives Open-Realty, an intriguing combination.
