Month: March 2011

Apartment hunting can be a total pain, and the hardest part is often locating an acceptable place in a desirable location. If you do your apartment search online like most people, you have two essential browser windows open: one for a site like craigslist or Rent.com and another for Google Maps to get an idea of where the places you find are actually located. This can get annoying quickly.

Lucky for apartment hunters everywhere, there’s PadMapper. Using Google Maps and pulling available apartment information directly from apartment listings across the internet, PadMapper is a fully integrated apartment search engine. If you’ve ever used Google Maps for any purpose, you’ll know how to use PadMapper. The service is completely free and allows you to filter your searches based on a number of different factors, including maximum monthly rent, number of bedrooms and bathrooms, neighborhood location, amenities, and whether pets are allowed.

Clicking on a selection in PadMapper opens a new tab in your browser to the listing’s direct web address. From time to time the posting will be out of date, but generally you’ll end up with additional useful information about the listing. If you register with PadMapper, you can also save listings to your favorites and come back to them later on.

PadMapper is available for free both as a web app online and also on the iPhone through the PadMapper Apartment Search app. Prepare to find your next apartment with ease. PadMapper puts some fun back into apartment hunting!

Popular Twitter client Echofon has recently released some interesting updates for Mac, iPhone and iPad.

Echofon for iPhone and iPad now clock in at 4.0.3. This update seems mainly to be a bug fixer, removing some non-crucial but irritating glitches, such as the “email this link” feature that didn’t work .

Meanwhile, the desktop version for Mac moved from 1.3 to 1.4. Not a huge jump, admittedly, but in this case, a really interesting one. This update allows you to mute users, clients or hashtags, a godsend for those irritating people you can’t stand to follow, but can’t afford to unfollow! It also improves notification settings, making alerts easier to manage and, crucially, other alerts easier to disable.

More information here, image courtesy of Echofon.

Cactus McCoy is a sideways scrolling beat ’em up, with a western theme and lots of weapons! This is a Flash based cartoon game with a silly story – you play McCoy, who finds a mysterious stone that turns you into a cactus-hero! Strangely, Cactus McCoy doesn’t seem to have any super powers beyond being green and spiky, but that doesn’t spoil what is a well made if simplistic beat ’em up.

Although there is just one attack button, the range of weapons make it all quite enjoyable. Taking out baddies with a branch is kind of funny, and there’s even a water pistol lying around! Overall, Cactus McCoy is a great little arcade timewaster to play in your browser. Head over to Kongregate and check it out.

Have you ever tried to watch a YouTube video and found it painfully slow? Ever tried to watch a TV show streamed online and found it stopping and starting constantly? Or simply tried to download a file from your e-mail and had to wait ages for it to complete? Most of us at some stage have suffered from painfully slow downloads and the causes can be various. More often than not though, the biggest culprit is bandwidth throttling by your Internet Service Provider (ISP) particularly at peak usage periods such as evenings and weekends.

Bandwidth throttling is when an ISP purposely restricts the amount of bandwidth that you’re using in order minimize traffic congestion. As HD video and other bandwidth heavy applications demand more and more bandwidth, users are increasingly noticing the squeeze being put on them. That’s why todays announcement by Britain’s major ISPs that they are going to reveal exactly how they manage traffic and throttle bandwidth should be applauded and followed by ISPs everywhere.

This greater transparency reduces the threat to net neutrality – i.e. the temptation of ISPs to make deals with net giants such as Google that websites such as YouTube will be given bandwidth priority over smaller websites. How exactly this greater transparency will work is not clear though. Whether ISPs will be forced to publish reports of how they’ve managed traffic over a certain period or whether they will provide real-time updates on how traffic is being managed remains to be seen.

However, although transparency moves like this should be encouraged, it is no substitute for investment in infrastructure which is the main problem. One of the main reasons that South Korean Users can look forward to speeds of up to 1Gbps – 200 times faster than British average of 5Mbps – is that South Korea has invested heavily in its internet infrastructure. This is not only essential to providing a fair service for all but also for maintaining the innovation that makes the net so exciting. As John Naughton points out in The Guardian today:

The reason the internet has been such an powerful enabler of innovation is that it is, at its core, a meritocratic network which is not owned or controlled by anyone. All it does is take data packets in at one end and deliver them to their destinations at the other. And it was designed to be agnostic about the packets – to give them all the same treatment. In that sense, it was “neutral” towards applications. If you had a good idea that could be implemented in data packets, then the internet would do it for you, no questions asked.

That ISPs should seek to provide a more transparent service that continues to maintain a level playing field for innovation in applications is something all software developers and users should support.