The need to sort out the “Town/City Search” issue with Tesco Finder gave me the excuse to update this iPhone application with the users’ most requested feature: prices and offers.
The updated application has just been submitted to the Apple iTunes App Store and so should be arriving on your iPhone in the next few days.
This new data come from the live Tesco Grocery API. If the store you are searching delivers grocery home shopping, you’ll see prices (and offers where relevant) on every product.
If the store you are searching does not deliver home shopping, the data comes from looking up the information at one of our so-called”Dotcom-Only Store” warehouses, which has amongst the largest product ranges. The range you search will be for your selected store, but the prices and offers (which are national anyway) will come from the warehouse range, as long as there is a 1:1 match. Some products may show without a price if it’s in your store but not in the warehouse.
Here are a few screen shots to show you the updates:
First, an update opening screen announcing the arrival of prices and special offers:
Now, proof that the Town/City Search works wonderfully (via our own servers!):
So as usual you type in a search word to get your products. In this version of Tesco Finder, the app is using the power of the search system on our grocery web servers to perform the search which gives much improved relevance over my initial method which involved simple SQL searching. The new search copes with spelling problems and other text-searching challenges – oh and look: PRICES! And not just prices – products on any sort of special offer get highlighted in the search results:
Select a product to see full details – and spot the Tesco ‘Price Cut’ (£-and-scissors) button to the left of the location description:
Touch the price cut button to see a full description of the offer – and a gentle reminder that these are guide prices, which I have talked about in previous entries on this blog:
I hope you like the updates. Actually I better give the source code back to my colleague and the app’s author, Tom Courthold, before I do anything more to it. I’ll be in enough trouble as it is!
Anyway this update application is on its way to you now, and will appear in your updates list as soon as it passes through Apple’s QA team.