First name Pad, last name Mapper. If you’d like updates about PadMapper.com via facebook, add Pad Mapper as your friend. There’s also a group and a page, if that’s more your style, but the person version is the best.
Archives for January 2009
Citimove
My friend showed me an interesting site for finding a moving company that she said saved her a lot of money in her move:Â http://www.citimove.com/
Seems to be primarily for movers in the northeast, so not good for everyone. If anyone tries it, let me know how it goes. I might build a collection of vetted moving sites if I can get more and figure out some sort of vetting process.
Discoverability vs. Usability
I think one of the things that makes PadMapper fun to play with (at least for me) is its responsive filter sliders – drag, and very quickly, you see the herd of markers thin out. Drag some more to try a slightly cheaper place, and you see SoHo (or your local very-desirable neighborhood) drop out completely. Then you play with it some more to find the least you can pay and still eke out a spot in that nice neighborhood.
So, I’m loathe to hide these awesome things from the sight of new users, for fear that they might never discover them and see what makes PadMapper cool. But it’s not very nice to come with a tiny screen and see half of it covered up with sliders, so tonight I changed it so that the filters would be hidden by default. Hopefully noobs will see the label and click the arrow to try them out, or they’ll be told about it if they were told about the site.
Launched!
There’s really nothing different about PadMapper today than there was yesterday, but today I decided that PadMapper had reached the threshold of being good enough to use, so I told lots of people about it, and I guess that’s what a launch is.
Because of the “launch”, I got a lot of great suggestions. Here are a few that kept coming up:
- Make the filter box smaller (it’s too big on a lot of screens) – Right now I’m looking into ways of doing this without making it less functional. I’m going to try to make a bottom-bar version, which several people suggested. Hopefully I’ll have this one remedied soon. Until then, use the little arrow buttons to shrink the box when not messing with the filters.
- Add the ability for users to post their own listings – I’ve been planning this one for a while, but I’m waiting until there’s enough traffic so that people who post will get some bites. It would suck to go through the trouble of coming up with a witty description and then not have anyone email you to compliment you on it.
- Add Other Filters (bathrooms, etc)Â – I’m currently working on this… bathrooms first. I don’t know how good the results will be, since Craigslist doesn’t have any sort of requirement for bathrooms to be listed, but if you know how many bathrooms you want, it should cut out most of the listings that don’t list it.
- Extend the subway filter to driving distance filter – I think this would be amazing, but it’s much harder, and I’m going to wait until I have a big chunk of time to mess with it, and I’ve taken care of some of the basics.
I’ll try to get these into PadMapper pretty soon, especially fixing the box and adding the bathroom filter.
PadMapper gets a logo
My brother whipped up this fine piece of work tonight, probably while avoiding a paper or problem set. It’s pretty simple, and I think it works pretty nicely. It’s recognizable even when shrunk, the colors are pretty muted don’t clash with the existing colors, and it matches the name. I’m pretty impressed. Not bad for a bioengineering major.
Hopefully its inclusion didn’t break the layout of the site of anyone’s browser… please let me know if it does. If you have any tweaks that you think could make it better, also feel free to comment, and they might make it into version 2. As always: padmapper@gmail.com
First Post!
Someone mentioned PadMapper in their blog with this glowing review: “Competitor to HousingMaps. Potentially better.”
It’s a short blog post…
But I think that’s the first blog post elsewhere that mentions it, so for that, it will always be special.
Here’s a link if you’re curious, but those two sentences are seriously all there is to the post. http://minutely.h3h.net/post/68526057/padmapper-free-craigslist-apartment-search