We’ve redesigned Kahoots to work better on small monitors, to emphasize information over clutter, and to be simpler to use than ever before.  Here’s a quick rundown to help you get acquainted with the new face of Kahoots.

Where’s the menu?

All the familiar menu commands - including Search, Advertise, and Reports - are organized horizontally at the top of the page.  This opens up space to let your search results run the entire width of the screen.

Your Preferences, as well as the Help and Logout commands, have been moved to the top-right, away from the main menu.  You won’t need to call on these as frequently as Searches and Advertisements, so we’ve given them their own convenient space.

Where are all the buttons?

One way we’ve made Kahoots easier (and faster) was by reducing what we call button-hunting.  Instead of asking you to scroll your eyes, and then your mouse, over to find a button, we want Kahoots to show controls only where and when you need them.

When you want to add pictures to a building, change an agent’s home office, or delete a saved search, just click anywhere on the building, employee, or search.  Kahoots will open a list of appropriate actions right beneath your mouse cursor.  Click on your choice, or click elsewhere to close the list.

With Quicksearch, nearly anything you’re looking for is just a few keystrokes away.

Your Quicksearch box is always accessible from the upper-right corner of the Kahoots interface.

Click into the Quicksearch box, and start typing an ad referal number, or the name of a street, neighborhood, or landlord.  Type just a few letters, and Quicksearch will hunt down and display the best matches for your search.  Click a match to see its associated listings, or click elsewhere to close and reset Quicksearch.

The new Ruby template is like a greatest hits album - it brings together the visual flair of Sapphire, the big photos from Vanilla, and the office logo from the Standard template.  If you’ve ever been known to mix breakfast cereals, or hover in indecision over the dessert menu, we made Ruby just for you.

To try it out, select Ruby from the Ad Style dropdown in your advertisement’s Full Details screen.

The Ruby template is also used for the Web Listings Kahoots puts on your website.  You can even customize its color to blend with the look and feel of your site.

Using the power of Adobe Flash, Kahoots can present your data in stylish, interactive charts and graphs.

Mouse-over any point on your charts for a detailed explanation.  You can even print a hard copy for the boardroom or the office wall;  just right-click any Flash chart and choose Print Chart.

This feature requires the Adobe Flash plugin for your Firefox browser.  If it’s not already installed, you can get Flash here at Adobe’s official site.

There are more charts to come, so please drop us a line and let us know if there’s one in particular you want to see.

Kahoots keeps track of the last time you ran a search, and bookmarks your most recent queries under the Searches menu.  Use the Full Search List option in the Searches menu to browse a complete catalog of your saved searches.

By popular request, we’ve added a Last Updated column to your search results, so you can keep track of how long it’s been since a listing was changed.

To sort your search results by their freshness, change to Flat Display, and click the Last Updated header at the top of its column.

Remember also that your Dashboard can automatically alert you whenever any listings have gone too long without updates.

Kahoots can help you stay on top of your scheduled calls to landlords and management companies.

To log a call you’ve made, or to plan your next call, enter the landlord’s Full Details page and set the Last Contact Date and Next Contact Date accordingly.  Then check the Landlord Contact report under the Reports menu to see a list of upcoming calls and their deadlines.

Now you can customize your integrated Web Listings to blend in perfectly with the rest of your website.

To change the primary color of your listings, login as an office administrator and enter the Preferences page.  Select the Live Listings tab, and enter a valid hex code for the new color.

“My school is on the Red Line.”  

“I take the commuter rail to work.”  
“I don’t have a car, so at the very least I need to be near a bus stop.”

How often do you you hear remarks like those above?  In a densely-developed market like Boston, access to public transit is a top concern for renters.  Now Kahoots lets you instantly find and deliver listings that match a client’s commute.

From your search screen, use the Near Public Transportation dropdown to find listings near train lines, bus routes, and commuter rail stops. In addition to individual train lines, you can choose Any Train to open your search to all lines, or Any MBTA Stop to include bus routes.

You can decide whether your new searches will default to on-market apartments only, or scan your whole listings database.  In your Preferences screen, toggle the Search on-market by default button to choose settings for any new search you run.