House Proud
Searching for real estate online is great, unless you want to get a feel for a new area.
Thankfully, Google has beefed up its real estate maps spinoff with some handy new tools that help give you a sense of a particular locale.
Search for a city, suburb or neighborhood. A sidebar to the left presents available properties (you can search for rentals or for-sale listings) while the map labels each property with an interactive red marker.
To learn more about a particular property, click on the marker. With the Street View tool you can walk through the area virtually. Zoom in and you can do a close-up on the exterior of the actual property.
You can also look for nearby businesses and do a directions search to get a sense of how easy (or challenging) your commute to work will be.
Another real estate site with new features is the old stalwart Trulia, which has added both rental properties and a new feature that allows users to search for bargains on foreclosed properties.
Not that we encourage you to kick people when they’re down, but…
Find and Book Parking Anywhere You Drive
Finding a parking spot in a crowded urban area is one of those exquisitely frustrating experiences that modern life presents us with.
That’s why we’re surprised it took so long for somebody to come up with ParkWhiz, a nifty service that lets you reserve a parking spot weeks before you leave the house.
Create an account and choose the venue where you’ll need to find parking. The site covers airports, sports arenas, theaters and downtown areas in more than 75 U.S. cities. You’ll pay for the spot when you make the reservation, and the price includes a small commission. (You print a ticket to take with you, guaranteeing your spot).
If you search for a specific venue the site will give you a list of dates and available spots, listed with their prices and distances in miles from the venue.
To search for parking along a given street, click on their “Downtown” tab and type in the address. The site gives you more options if you’re searching in a major city (LA, Chicago, Boston, San Francisco and NYC are all well-supported).
The site even lets you post listings if you have a spot that you want to rent out. They’ll accept reservations for the spot, keep track of usage and even funnel payments into your account.
If only there were a service that got rid of traffic and bad drivers…
Keep Track Of Your Life With An All-In-One To-Do Tool
Keeping track of your life is never easy, no matter how many different time management services you use.
In fact, having too many options is often a big part of the problem.
Enter Remember The Milk, a task management service that integrates all of your organizational programs into one intuitive, easy-to-use interface.
The site will send you alerts on Twitter, Blackberry, Gmail and Google Calendar. It even uses Google Gears to work when you’re offline.
Most of the management is done via the profile you create on the site. The Tasks page is where you add your upcoming responsibilities. Customize them by filling out time estimates, tags, locations, and even the number of times you’ve put off a given task.
Finally, label your entries as either Personal, Study or Work items (you can also customize these labels). As time goes by, your Inbox will fill up with all the tasks you never completed (these are “overdue”) as well as those you have to finish in the next few days.
These items will show up everywhere you want them to—Gmail, Twitter, your IM client and your smartphone (they’ve released iPhone and Android apps).
The service is free, though power users may want to consider the “Pro” account, which costs $25 per year.
Or you can keep using those scraps of paper that litter your wallet.