One of the major perks of working on the engineering team at Redfin is the privilege to take on side projects in addition to the day-to-day assignments. We call it our “quarterly objectives,” where each quarter, engineers or product managers are allowed to dedicate a portion of their time to projects that they’re passionate about…. Read More
A while ago, we updated our mobile app to be compatible with iOS 6 and iPhone 5. While we were working with the latest Xcode that comes with SDK 6, we found a strange behavior in MKMapKit’s regionThatFits method. In MKMapView, a region is an area defined with a lat/long coordinate as the center and a span… Read More
Internet Explorer 9 Beta sometimes gives the wrong answer when we ask for the size of the viewport (viewable area of the browser window). On an HTML document with “X-UA compatible” set to IE=7 and Windows font DPI set to 125% or 150% with the browser window maximized, IE9 claims the viewport is a few… Read More
Those of us on the Redfin data team see every data problem that gets reported by our users. Of course, if we were to respond directly to each of them, we’d never get anything else done (okay, our data’s not that bad), but luckily the product management team takes care of that for us. One… Read More
Last week, Microsoft released a beta version of a tool called MapCruncher. MapCruncher allows you to take a rendered image (GIF, PNG, JPG) and create a set of map tile layers that can be then drawn over a Virtual Earth (VE) map with the correct projection. Since Redfin’s map is based on VE’s platform, I… Read More
There’s a pretty big technology change on Redfin.com today – the integration of Microsoft Virtual Earth as our underlying map platform. Redfin pioneered the use of satellite maps to display information about for sale homes. We built an in-house mapping solution using imagery acquired from various sources (mostly the USGS.) Since then a few other… Read More