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

Now that everything is up to date and Seoul City Metro has been up on the App Store for a few months I think it's time for a sale! I've orchestrated some facebook advertising, updated the Seoul City Metro Website and given the App Store time to propagate both the 1.1.2 update and the new price.

Seoul City Metro and Busan City Metro are now on sale until March 22nd!

I've decided to finally attack the $1 price point, as well as give away a premium app for free. I'm hoping this sale can raise the rankings of Seoul City Metro on the Korean App Store over and above the competition apps by being the best looking app at $1. I'm also hoping some good reviews and happy users will lead to some increased exposure and eventually sales for Seoul City Metro. I'll post results of the sale (good or bad!) next week when all the numbers are in.

Checkout the Seoul City Metro website front page for more info!

It had been grating on me over the last couple of weeks knowing that Seoul City Metro and Seoul City Metro Lite were not up to date with the new train stations opened on Line 1 (Dangjeong Station and Seodongtan Station) and Line 3 ( Garak Market, National Police Hospital and Ogeum). I held off an immediate update when the stations opened because I wanted to wait for the SMRT.co.kr maps to be updated properly and I wanted to include a few tweaks to the route detail interface.

New stations on line 3

As weeks moved on I was feeling increasingly  like my apps were out of date, and the SMRT maps still hadn't been updated to reflect the new stations. So yesterday I just had had enough and pushed new stations, updated timetables and a manually modified map to both Seoul City Metro, and Seoul City Metro Lite. I was reluctant to manually update the maps because I don't have them in vector format but I was quite happy with the end result. Both updates were approved for sale in under 11 hours - and are available for download das you read this. (iTunes link)

I also managed to include one minor tweak to the route interface, allowing easier access to the timetables for a particular route. Although the timetables are far from where I want them, this is a step in the right direction. Also, the door side is now shown for the destination station the same as it is with transfers. (See screen shot below)

You can click the blue disclosure button on route start and transfers to see the next trains departing.

In other news:

Custom Map to scale in early stages

I've been building my own custom subway map for Seoul that will appear in upcoming versions of Seoul City Metro that will release me from the constraints of the SMRT map. It's well on it's way, you can see images of it's progress via @seoulmetroapp and here.

Busan City Metro is on sale this week too, I've reduced it to $0 as more of a test of the waters. (iTunes Link)

Oh, and I'm back in Melbourne for the time being.

I just got emailed this morning that my quick point release for Seoul City Metro has been approved. That was less than 48 hours from submission. Call me impressed!

It's a total change of pace when a new binary can be pushed to customers that quickly. My "What's new in this update" stated that it was just two small bug fixes, I wonder if that had any influence on the review team that saw the initial 1.1 release only 5 days ago.

Anyway, a win! Seoul City Metro Lite is also now in review.

SeoulMetroApp announces it on twitter