As you might be aware, we’re currently putting the finishing touches on the Rex mobile application; our new ‘office in your pocket’ that gives Google a run for their money. But first, we thought we’d introduce some of the team that brought it to life.Meet Tom.
Tom, boy genius, is leading the mobile app development team. Tom joined our team last year after two successful careers in competitive video-gaming and digital marketing for a zany company that sold kitchen utensils of questionable usefulness. I managed to pry him away from his computer for a chat.Pleasure to have you with us in the marketing department, Tom. “Nice to be here, Jacko.” Let’s start with a few quick questions. Favourite book?“The Belgariad series by David Eddings.”Favourite movie?“The Social Network.”Favourite band?“Swedish House Mafia.”Perfect Sunday?“Well I’m a huge nerd so probably just a sleep in and some video games...”Sounds fantastic. How’s the app coming along? “It’s been pretty exciting to have a full team of 12 developers all working on the one big project. Normally we’d be split up into individual tasks, so it’s been a great bonding experience. There’s been some real excitement around the place. I’ve never seen so many coders working together on the same thing. The app is coming along very well - we’ve just rolled out our alpha version internally to prepare for a beta release to early-access clients, so now it’s just down to furiously squashing all the most obvious bugs.” Any difficulties so far? “Working on mobile applications is always a little more difficult than normal web development. You can do almost anything when you’re coding for browsers, but phones have some pretty unique constraints you need to work around. You don’t have the same luxuries, and there was some pretty full-on functionality to be built. It really put us to the test. Plus, we need to keep the app performing well so we don’t have real estate agents waiting for hours to get a listing record to load - and that can be tricky on an app of this size.” What’s your favourite feature? “There’s no single feature that gets me as excited as I do when I see them all working together. The user experience team spent nine months perfecting the core workflow, and it’s really paid off. Every situation an agent might find themselves in while they’re out and about has been thought through five times over. You can call a client, save a note or add feedback on how it went, send a follow up SMS or email, read through any records, conduct OFIs - it’s on the fly and it’s all very seamless. We’re super happy with it.”So when can we expect to have this in the hands of users? “Just as soon as we’ve finished beta-testing. We’ll have a few agencies (and hopefully some more soon) trialling the pilot version, to help us iron out all the kinks before we release it to all our users. We’re aiming to have it live for everyone in late March / early April. Stay tuned.”Want to help Tom and the team make the Rex app as kick-ass as possible? Why not sign up for early access? We’d love to hear your feedback!SIGN UP FOR EARLY ACCESS
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