We’ve shipped two significant updates to our beer-hobbyist app TapCellar in the last 3 weeks.1 The first update included a large number of performance improvements, increased the off-line database to over 45,000 craft beers, changed the way we sync with BreweryDB, and added several new In App Purchase features I’ll describe below. The second update made the IAP actually work (sorry about that).
New Features There are a couple of new features we added as part of the “Pro” upgrade in TapCellar.
Terry Dorsey updated is utillity for exploring your TapCellar data. He does some clever things with command line output for producing simple charts. I really like his average grade by style output. This is precisely the reason we made TapCellar and made the data portable.
It’s worth checking out just for the Ruby scripts.
With TapCellar, we were really focused on making the data portable but private. We also didn’t just want the ability to backup and restore data. We wanted the backup to have its own value outside of the app. So, we backup everything in a single user accessible archive. The photos, label thumbnails and user data are all available to the customer.1 This makes for some interesting experiments and people do cool things when it’s easy to get at their information.
If you follow me on Twitter or Pinboard you may know that I’m a pretty big craft beer nerd. I have a rather large cellar of rare and varied beer and I love checking out what’s evolving in the market. I found a kindred spirit in Jeff Hunsberger and we made an app for beer nerds and we’re calling it TapCellar.1
There were a few key principles behind the design of TapCellar and I think these are what set the app apart from most other beer apps I’ve used.
