Carzone.ie


The Carzone.ie application is a native iPhone app for searching Ireland’s biggest used car website. it talks to a java RESTful webservice which was written by myself and my team (I work for Carzone full time) which returns JSON. I chose JSON because its lighter in weight than XML and the native XML parsing of the iPhone can be slow. It was also the quickest to implement on the server side.

The app has made the number one spot in the Lifestyle section and reached 2nd overall for free apps in the Ireland App Store.

The app can be downloaded here and the support page can be found here.

The app itself uses the Three20 Library for the photo viewer, and Stig Brautaset’s excellent JSON-framwork which has been around since 2007 and has been used in apps such as Adium and Twitterfon.

The rest of the carzone app was written by myself. It searches using the same mechanism as the website and the stock listings are therefore in sync with the website. The Makes and Models list updates daily from the site assuming there is a connection, otherwise it reverts to a locally stored copy, either from the last download or from the version supplied in the bundle.

I have implemented a number of interesting features that I will talk about in more detail over the coming weeks, such as:
  • Fast table cell drawing
  • Asynchronous image loading and caching
  • A custom UIPickerView Controller that can be called by simply passing a datasource and provides a number of ways to present the information