Realestate.com.au iPad app goes live! « How to make iPhone Apps and Influence People

19Aug/116

Realestate.com.au iPad app goes live!

It's been a number of months and some incredibly late nights in the making but the Realestate.com.au iPad App finally went live in the iTunes store last Friday, August 12. I was lucky enough to be able to give a demo of the app the night before release at the Melbourne Cocoaheads meeting at the Intunity offices in Cremorne and the response from probably the largest (70+) crowd ever to attend a cocoaheads was really exciting.

I joined the REA Mobile team back in March 2011 to help with the contenting development of their iPhone app, and after a UI uplift release for the iPhone we started working on the universal iPad app. After some hiccups along the way, we managed to deliver a brilliant looking, stable app that I'm really proud to have worked on. I'd say it's reset the bar for iOS property apps, and is streets above its competition.

The REA Mobile team is lead by Kevin O'Neill (@kevinoneill), second chaired by Luke Cunningham (@icaruswings) and backed up by Steve Hollaway, Ben Thomas, Mike Rowe, Myles Abbot, Mujtaba Hussain and myself.

Some awesome technical bits / features of the app include:

Custom forms (IBAForms) for advanced property searches.
A gorgeous custom UI including the little bits that are really hard to customise.
Custom map callouts are really hard to customise.
It's a true universal app it has a shared underlying code base and consistent behaviour, look and feel.
It rotates, and it rotates like a boss. Rotate it, and see it resize itself without any of that crappy UI flickering you see elsewhere.
Swishy tap, pan and swipe gesture recognisers all over the place make interactions really fluid.
It's damn fast (it has it's own purpose built back end).
It's stable. We tested the f*ck out of this app... and the competitors...
It caches images and searches and other things; it also behaves nicely when errors occur.
It's using the latest iOS 4+ technology and minimal amounts of old legacy code (there's always some right?)
It leverages/wrangles a handful of awesome open source frameworks.
It sets the bar for it's category in mobile property apps.

The realestate.com.au iPad app "Money Shot" as we call it

Custom callouts are one of the hard things to customise

So yeah ! If you haven't already - check it out on iTunes -> Realestate.com.au in iTunes

Posted by Jesse

Tagged as: appstore, iOS4, iosDev, ipad, projects, realestate.com.au Leave a comment

Comments (6) Trackbacks (0) ( subscribe to comments on this post )

Tony Milne
August 19th, 2011 - 17:01

The app looks great Jesse, good job man and congratz to the rest of the REA guys involved!

Sadly, it is all too common to see competitors coming to your site or app review page to shit all over your hard work with pathetic comments like fm’s. Fortunately (as is the case with this goose), the people leaving the comments usually aren’t the brightest tools in the shed.

We’ve seen similar comments on our apps with 1 star ratings. Clicked on the user and noticed they also gave 1 star ratings and pithy comments to other similar apps … all except one (how suspicious) … which they gave a 5 star rating and a glowing review. Use Google, discover they work for the company that produced the app awarded 5 stars. Hmmm, surprising? Hardly. :S

These people and their companies should learn to innovate and iterate themselves, that way they won’t feel so threatened by their competition.
Rajesh Singh
August 19th, 2011 - 17:10

Great work Jesse & co. As I’ve said before this is a great example of a well written app.
Michael Pearson
August 19th, 2011 - 17:35

Neither the REA app nor the Domain app provide the ability to bring Melbourne housing prices back down to affordable levels.

Zero stars.

(did I tell you about my idea to replace the RPData property reports with a big banner saying “Give up, you can’t afford it!”?)
Adam Eberbach
August 19th, 2011 - 18:08

This is a really nice app, it is smooth, polished and solid, one to be proud of.

I see the estate agents still don’t have a standard for house information in that only some properties have detailed floor plans, they still love super wide angle lenses but now they have discovered HDR photography!
Jesse
August 19th, 2011 - 18:29

Just a note. This post was meant to be a celebration of something awesome I’ve been working on.

Instead it turned out to cause me an afternoon of frustration after a really low-ball comment that really got to me for a number of reasons. (I might them make clear in a future post). I’ve removed the comment, and redacted my previous reply to said comment, I don’t want that negativity kept alive on this site.

Thanks everyone else for the awesome feedback.
Greg Alexander
August 20th, 2011 - 18:23

Very nice app, works really well. As you say – it’s fast and fluid, and easy to use.

It’s good to find such a polished app. Only one or 2 things I’d ask for differently but still gets full points.