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

Today I was tooling around with some interface concepts and playing with apps like foursquare and Twitter (previously Tweetie) and I wondered if I could implement something similar to the now famous 'pull down to refresh' method of initialising a refresh of the content within a UITableView.

As it turns out it wasn't as difficult as I thought; There were already a couple of elegant solutions out and about. The first example I found was by Oliver Dropnik, which talked about altering an existing solution posted on git hub by user devindoty called EGOTablePullViewRefresh.

Oliver's code looked like it was a good addition to devindoty's because he had decided to subclass UITableViewController which leads to a much more complete solution that's easier to move between projects. My only issue with Oliver's code was that it refactored a lot of the underlying implementation, where I didn't see too much wrong with it.

I decided to come up with a half way measure; I moved the majority of the grunt work into a subclass of UITableViewController, cleaned up the XCode Demo project included with the source code and pushed it all back up to git hub. If you're at at all interested in this, I'd suggest checking out my fork of the EGOTablePullViewRefresh project on Git Hub.

Get a pull-to-refresh effect like Tweetie 2 and foursuare

Update: Another pull to refresh implementation is now in the three20 library by Facebook, but I'm not sure where exactly it's buried.

My attention has been divided the past week or so between the development of Seoul City Metro v1.1 and looking ahead at other cities to cover. While I spend a lot of time scribbling down ideas and drawings (and code) for SCM v1.1 - I've found myself drifting back into Illustrator to come up with some new colours and iPhone icons for upcoming cities.

I thought I'd put a few intermediate ideas here, they're just as a few iterations on the original concept.

Iterations on the SCM Logo