We all love buying and trading goods, there’s no doubt about that. I know I usually try to get a deal if I’m not able to fund for that brand new price tag. Sometimes getting used is just as good as new. There are many websites out there for getting great deals on used gear. Craigslist is one of the largest sources for local bartering.
When you look at Craigslist these days, the design does look a little dated, granted the website is simple to navigate and it takes you directly to your search results. The folks over at Marketplacemac.com felt the design of Craigslist is fairly ugly, so they decided to develop an application.
Marketplace for the Mac is an application that allows you to browse through and search Craigslist.org without opening your web browser. The main interface is very simple. You just press create a new search, then you put in what you’re looking for.
The search box live updates when you’re putting in your region so you can quickly click on where you’re located. The search box also has other options to search in a price range and in subcategories.
The search results have two different views. You can view your results in a column view or in an in-line view like an e-mail client. I prefer looking at them in the in-line view because the column view sometimes forces you to make the application window larger than what I would like.
The listed view allows you to see more content versus the column view. This view makes it feel as if you’re reading e-mail. Along the bottom you have a quick utility bar, the bar let’s you open the craigslist in safari, e-mail to a friend, add the sale to your favorites, you can also increase and decrease the size of the text. The quick utility bar is nice, though I wish it would fade away if you mouse away from it, if not that, then at lease let me hide the bar.
Your previous searches are tucked to the left hand side, you can get to them at a later date if it’s something you search for often.
That’s basically the application though. Pretty good stuff. Especially if you don’t want to go to craigslist.org, there’s an application for you.
You can purchase the app for $19.95 US – for an additional $10.00 a family license option is available. I’m not sure I would use it enough to want to pay $20 for it, but some people are way into craigslist, for those folks, this is right up their alley.
