Food24 Restaurant Finder on the iPhone

24.com has launched a free Food24 Restaurant Finder iPhone app. The app is great – it lets you search or browse for restaurants, view restaurant details, click to dial the restaurant phone number, create a list of favourites, and read and post reviews and ratings from your phone.

The app is also something of a landmark development for us, as it’s the first app we’ve created using only in-house developers and designers, and it’s also the first app we’ve delivered that is tightly integrated with our CMS and search technology rather than being driven by content feeds in the same was as the News24 iPhone app.

A couple of things about the app that I think are super-cool:

• The app is integrated with our CMS platform both for reading data from the Food24 site and for posting back to the site. This means that ratings and reviews are shared between the site and the app in real-time, and if you’re sitting in a restaurant waiting hours for your food or you’ve just had the best service of your life you can share your thought immediately with anyone using the Food24 site or iPhone app. This CMS integration also lets the Food24 website editors update elements of the Food24 app like the “Featured” restaurants simply by dragging the restaurant name into a category in the CMS.
• Solr search for the restaurant search – we’re using a Solr index on the Fod24 restaurant database, and this same search technology is exposed to the iPhone app for powerful keyword and parameterised search queries
• True geo-search – the app has a button labelled “Near Me” which actually uses the phone GPS and then does a search for all restaurants within a 3km radius of your current location. You can manipulate the radius used in the search, which opens up really amazing search opportunities such as “show me a map with all the restaurants that serve sushi within 2km of where I am now”

This was a tech-led project, and was a great illustration of what’s possible when you leverage existing data and internal capabilities to create a new window on your content and new ways of interacting.

If you haven’t tried it yet, go to theiTunes App Store and download it, and please rate the app in iTunes once you’ve used it.

Drop a comment here if you have any feedback on the app.