California Apartments and Sublets for Rent, Select a City:

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PadMapper is a web application that aims to make searching online for an apartment to rent less painful by letting you see where the apartments are on a big Google map, and using the filters located in the box on the lower left to eliminate listings that you're not interested in.

When I was hunting for an apartment, I found myself reading through lots of ads that each had some fatal flaw (usually related to location) which was really time consuming to find for each one.

With PadMapper, you can rule out every place on Craigslist and PadMapper's other sources (Apartments.com, and tons of sources via Oodle) that doesn't match your location criteria at a glance. After that, PadMapper tries to put most of the relevant information in front of you so you can quickly decide whether you want to investigate further.

Some tips:

• Zooming in will cause areas to fill in more.
• PadMapper runs MUCH better in Google Chrome, Firefox 3, and Safari than it does in Internet Explorer 6 or 7.
• The number of markers that can be displayed onscreen at once is limited to roughly 100, since it becomes choppy in some browsers (Internet Explorer) with more.
• Filtering reserves those 100 spots for apartments that you're more likely to like.
• If there's a big area that's empty that probably shouldn't be, zoom in on that area. If that doesn't help, try easing up on your filters. Also, try moving any large clusters of apartments you're not interested in offscreen by dragging the map or zooming.
• Zooming in very close shows some cool local attractions around apartments (not available everywhere)

If you encounter anything that confuses you, or see any bugs, please email me at padmapper@gmail.com. Feedback really helps - user feedback is the reason PadMapper is what it is today. Thanks, and enjoy your hunt!

If you'd like more information, check out the blog, the About page on the blog, or the TopHat Monkey Software homepage. Here's a text-based browsing alternative (though it's more cumbersome): Sitemap