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

So much to update! Watch this space, as soon as I sort out the server issues there will be pretty pictures and graphics from all the work I've been up to the last 8 weeks.

What a night! Dragging myself up out of bed at 2:45 am (Seoul time) to check in to the MacTalk Australia live coverage; idle in ustream the IRC chat room; and refresh the live Gdgt.com text feed was totally worth it! Not only were the rumours true; but the price is reasonable and the versions arriving with 3G connectivity (using the strange Micro-Sim card ) will come unlocked. iPad runs on a new version of the iPhone OS; on custom Apple silicone; and touts an all glass 9.7 inch multi touch display. 60 and 90 day arrival times for the Wifi and 3G versions respectively.

My opinion: I want one.

Apple iPad hands on from Wired.com Gadget Lab

Demonstations of the device appearing all over the web show the iPad with a multi column layout, orientating to however you hold the device. I can't wait to see what developers make of the new UI elements and SDK APIs.

As far as my development goes - all my current work on Seoul City Metro 1.1 appears to be compatible and runs just fine in the iPad's simulator in it's 1x and 2x zoom mode. Anyway, just a few screenshots that I've already posted on twitter - time to get back to work.

iPad Simulator with Seoul City Metro 1.1 Installed

Seoul City Metro V1.1 running in the iPad Simulator