Category Archive for ‘Reviews’ at Center for REALTOR® Technology Web Log

Archive for the 'Reviews' Category

Beware of the Leopard, Part 2

Published

on November 7, 2007

. 0 Comments

So I have been using Leopard now for a little over a week. All in all the experience has been a good one, but with some niggling issues.

1. Time Machine, I’ve had some issues with TM in the week I’ve been working on it.

- When it works it’s great. But it seems that the first backup of the day slows my machine to a crawl for a long time. After the first backup of the day, all the incremental backups run just fine. I improved this a bit by taking certain files and folder out of TM. The ones that I took out where Parallels VMs, and files that I have under source control.

- I also had to fiddle with the folders TM backed up along with Spotlight. I had Spotlight NOT index my TM folders (I don’t want to see them in the results of searches). The problem with this is that when I want to find a file I need to recover I won’t be able to use Spotlight to help me. What I really want is for Spotlight to be smart about TM backups. I want my TM backups to be index, but to not appear in search results. But I would like to be able to easily search TM backups in Spotlight when needed, but for Spotlight to show the file as a backup and also to show which backup it was found in. In this mode I would also like to be able to recover the file if needed. I guess I want better integration between Spotlight and TimeMachine, which would seem like a no brainer to me.

2. Mail. Faster and more useful then the one in Tiger, but I’ve noticed some stability problems, and the way some of the new features work is not very compelling to me.

- MailActOn Plugin just stops working at times. I need to restart Mail to get it to work.

- Mail sometimes hangs. I am forced to Force Quit Mail and restart. Sometimes, when it hangs, it hangs hard (usually when TM is backing up, so I think they are interferring with each other). When this happens Force Quit doesn’t work, and I have to restart the whole Mac to fix it.

- Notes & Todos. When I got the Leopard version of MailTags, one of the things they took out was Events and ToDos. This bothers me now. The way Notes and ToDo and Events are handled in the new Mail is not as useful as the way MailTags did it. If I store a ToDo on my IMAP server, it puts that ToDo in a Calendar called ‘calendar’ in the group CRT. I don’t want this. I want it to create the ToDo in my Work calendar. As a result I have configured Mail to store all nots and ToDos in my local computer. This allows me to create ToDos from Mail in the correct calendar, but I cannot tie them to a mail message. The notes are OK, but I have yet to use them. It might take me some time to see this feature being useful.

So, after a week I can see where the problems in Leopard are. I still think this upgrade is useful. But like all upgrades, Apple will have to do some work to fix all the kinks.

Beware of the Leopard, Part 1.

Published

Andrew Tillman

on November 1, 2007

in Reviews

. 2 Comments

So today I joined the Apple masses in upgrading my work Mac to Leopard. I figured I’d give my first day impressions.

1. The upgrade itself was painless. While some people have had problems with the upgrade I fortunately did not run into any.

2. The new Finder has a new look. I like Cover view and the sources sidebar. It seems that Apple is going to unify their look-and-feel around the iTunes model. I will need to work with Leopard more to give a better review.

3. Time Machine got setup with almost no effort. It recogized my USB hard drive and asked me if I wanted to use that drive for time machine. All I had to do was tell it what not to backup. The rest it did on it’s own. I will need to use this over time to see if it holds up.

4. iCal. I like iCal’s new look. I am also looking forward to see how iCal works with CalDAV. The only issue I had was a little trouble with Spanning Sync. Nothing serious, but I did need to upgrade to the latest version.

5. Mail. This is the app that I use the most during the day, and therefore the app I noticed the changes the most.

- All my plugins where deactivated when I started Mail. This was annoying. I use MailTags and Mail Act-On heavily and have come to count on them. However I was able to get both those plugins working again, had I not I would have seriously considered going back to Tiger.

- IMAP seems to be much faster. One of the annoying things with Mail Act-On was that it took some time to finish actions that required a IMAP write back to the server. Now these actions are much faster. It seems that Mail has improved it IMAP support. It even supports IDLE without a plugin!

- Reminders in Mail are nice. Since I use a Ticker file with MailTags due dates I have turned Mail into a little GTD program. The only problem I have is there seems to be no way for me to tell Mail to hide ToDos until they are due today or past due. I also cannot view them at the same time as my Today tickler folder. I’d like to have one view to see everything I need to do.

- RSS in Mail is also nice. While I still plan to keep using Vienna for most of my RSS needs, I do plan on moving some of my RSS feeds to Mail. All of the RETS.org feeds can go in there, and since MailTags works with RSS articles I can incorporate them into my Today folder.

That’s it so far. I have yet to use Spaces, and I really need more time with Time Machine, Finder and Mail to see give a more detailed review. I plan on posting again after Annual, and we can see how well Leopard works on a travel laptop.

The Internet Is A Series Of Pipes

Published

Andrew Tillman

on August 15, 2007

in Internet and Reviews

. 0 Comments

I recently found myself in want of a service that allowed me to aggregate my Google Calendars. In searching around I stumbled across Pipes. Pipes is a service that allows you to aggregate several feeds soruces into a single feed. The sources and output can be RSS, icalendar and other formats. What sets Pipes apart is that you can fiter, sort and transform the items in the feeds before outputing the aggregate so you can create some very powerful custom feeds. The idea behind Pipes is similar to *nix command line tools where you can pipe the output of one tool to the input of another to create some very powerful chains of commands. Pipes a fairly intuitive user interface for wiring the different peices together to create your aggragate feed, you just drag the output of one peice to the input of another.

Chris was able to use Pipes to create a feed that searches blogs and see if NAR is mentioned, to help us find out who is talking about us.

Pipes is still in beta, I for one was unable to aggregate different Google calendar feeds in a way that could be imported into iCal. Also, documentation of how to use some of the pieces is pretty sparse. But Pipes is a tool that has a lot of possiblities, and I look forward to seeing how it develops.

How do you measure support?

Published

Mark Lesswing

on July 20, 2007

in General and Reviews

. 3 Comments

I wanted to share a tale of customer support that I think all of you will appreciate because all of us support someone. Let me start with a little background first.

At work, there is a support group that takes care of my hardware and from the software perspective, I support myself. At home it is a different situation, I have built four of my computers (I have a sound studio and a train layout) except for one that is a shiny new iMac. OK, I forgot my son at college who has a MacBook Pro. My experience with support is the kind that involves returning failed components for replacement. I did have one experience with a major printer manufacturer that became frustrating and time consuming. This and other experiences (friends and families) is how I formed my low opinion of Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM) support. Now on with my tale.

Continue reading ‘How do you measure support?’

iPhone: 5 days later

Published

Keith Garner

on July 12, 2007

in Gadgets and Reviews

. 7 Comments

Image used without permission from Apple Last Friday July 6th at about 1 I picked up my iPhone. I wanted to give it a serious couple of days of use before I posted about it. I also wanted to make sure I did a few things that NAR’s members would do on a day to day basis.

We all heard and read about the activation problems in the first 24 hours or so. I’m happy to report that those issues were non-existent when I went to activate. Almost everything you do with the phone starts with iTunes, and activation is no different. I fired up iTunes, plugged the phone into the USB port and just started answering the questions. The activation went very smooth and I was mostly using my phone within 15 minutes of getting back from the Apple store. The snag I had though was in transferring my number from my old carrier. It took them 24 hours to give up the number to AT&T. During that time I could make calls and do network functions like e-mail and web surfing, but I couldn’t receive calls. Once that was done, it went like a shot.

Synchronization is also done via iTunes. On my OS X based MacBook Pro, this provides for a very tight integration with tools that Apple ships with OS X. The good side is much like an iPod sync, things just go when you cradle your device. The down side is that you’re tied to using iTunes. If you’re on OS X or Windows this isn’t really an issue. For those on other platforms, this could be a limiting issue. I haven’t tried syncing the phone with Windows so I can’t comment on what you can and cannot do via iTunes on the Windows and how well it integrates other than knowing what tools Apple says is supported on the stats page.

The rest of this will really focus on the parts of the phone I really interact with. If I don’t mention an app or don’t really talk about it, I haven’t used it much yet.
Continue reading ‘iPhone: 5 days later’

Deep Links - May 25, 2007

Published

Chris McKeever

on May 25, 2007

in Articles, Ask a Tech, Blogroll, Gadgets, Internet, MLS, Projects, Reviews and Tools

. 1 Comment

Ian’s Deep Link’n

Pcworld offers a list of what they consider the best tech products of 2007
http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,131935-page,13/article.html
GPS tracker for your pets with alarm if your pet leaves a predefined area
http://www.roameoforpets.com/
Serious data storage
http://infobunker.com/our_facility.shtml
Interface solution- big fingers and small screens
http://www.technologyreview.com/Infotech/18770/

Deep Links May-17-2007

Published

Chris McKeever

on May 17, 2007

in Articles, Ask a Tech, Gadgets, Internet, Projects, Reviews and Tools

. 1 Comment

Keith’s Deep Link’n

Plotr is a lightweight charting framework that allows you to create bar, line, and pie charts using just a few lines of JavaScript code inside plain HTML files.
http://www.linux.com/article.pl?sid=07/05/04/1457210
http://solutoire.com/plotr/

CSharp syntax and formatting mode for emacs
http://mfgames.com/linux/csharp-mode

A good thread from Joel on Software on where to get an SMS number. Looks prohibitively expensive in the US.

Joe Gross’s procmail tutorial.
http://www.stimpy.net/procmail/tutorial/

I’m thinking about getting this Ogio backpack as a new laptop backpack. Anyone have any experience with them? I’m having a hard time finding one in a store to check out.
http://www.ogio.com/product.php?product=128

Chris’ Deep Link’n

Encrypted bandwidth-efficient backup using the rsync algorithm
http://duplicity.nongnu.org/

Broker Website of the Future!

$100 Dollar Laptop Project First Shipments! I want one!
http://olpc.tv/category/children/

622 RSS Feeds over Coffee! I thought I was bad!

Software License Tracker

SMS 101: Understand the Power.

Unlimited Yahoo! Mail Storage: About time!

25 Hours in a day coming soon.

Meebo Launches Chat Rooms for IM service.

Gordon’s Deep Link’n

Who is Gordon? - Gordon is the Technical Project Lead from The Greater Vancouver Board

CREA Commercials - a h00t!

See-Through CEO

Published

Mark Lesswing

on April 16, 2007

in General, Internet and Reviews

. 0 Comments

I was handed an article called The See-Through CEO today and I realized two things. First, my reading is falling behind; shame on me for being behind on Wired magazine. The second thing that struck me was how effective the web can be regarding image.

The article uses the phrase “reputation management system” as a way to think about the Internet and corporate management. I believe that most of the Real Estate industry primarily views blogging as a Lead Generation mechanism. This is because of the impact blogs have on Search Engine Optimization (SEO). I think Clive Thompson did a nice job explaining how the same SEO effect can be used for corporate messaging purposes.

The same transparency that improves corporate reputations are also why some consumers trust rough cut, “YouTube” style home tours. There is something about the “amatuerish” (OK, I’ll say it, non-professional) quality of some web content that some people translate into genuine and sincere glimpses into the author’s personality.

This means that grammar and spelling are still important because the rough cut vs. professional video comparison does not directly translate to text. Consumers just want more than well crafted spin. Being transparent means letting consumers understand a bit more about what is behind corporate decisions; a glimpse into the thought process and factors that were considered.

Would you like a condo with that coffee?

Published

Chris McKeever

on March 19, 2007

in Internet and Reviews

. 5 Comments

Taking a neighborhood stroll Sunday morning, I came across a wifi coffee shop which I had thought (unfortunately) went under. It turns out, that it had, but it has also been given a rebirth, this time with a Real Estate spin to it.

@Spot re-opened its doors earlier this year in conjunction with Chicago based @Properties. The new venture, if successful, will be 1 of 4 planned rollouts for this year.

The concept is to help brand @Properties to the demographic that is also searching online for homes. Keying in on this trend could prove to be strategic in deeply establishing and maintaining a foothold within the competitive Chicago Market.

I really like this idea. As brokers are wrestling where to apply their advertising budget, why not establish a dedicated presence right in the neighborhoods in which they serve without opening a full blown office?

Could this concept be taken one step further, and compound it with ‘virtual offices’. Add in a conference room, voice-over-ip soft phones, access controlled printing and you have a branch office that a typical on-the-go agent can work out of.

What better way to establish a neighborhood image, all at the same time of getting prospective clients in the door. Plus its a whole lot cheaper than buying a sports arena!

Now, can I expense my coffee while there, as I will be doing industry research?

Center for REALTOR® Technology Web Log

Archive for the 'Reviews' Category

Beware of the Leopard, Part 2

Beware of the Leopard, Part 1.

The Internet Is A Series Of Pipes

How do you measure support?

iPhone: 5 days later