Blog archives

Remembeer 1.2 was recently released and the main feature we added was a Beer Cloud. With Remembeer 1.0 anytime you had a beer more than once any additional information you logged about that beer the first time would be automatically filled in the second time you had one. Now with Remembeer’s Beer Cloud anytime anyone has had that beer you can get all of the information they logged, even if you never tried that beer before. Also if they only posted Brewery information, but you happen to know where that brewery is located you can add that. Which means that the next person to try that beer will get both bits of information.

We like to think that Remembeer’s Beer Cloud will eventually become a Wikipedia of beer. Someone could say that Sierra Nevada Pale Ale is a Lager, but over time so many more people would say that it is a Pale Ale that the cloud would (quickly, actually) determine that it is a Pale Ale and will ignore the Lager claim.

Another concern people may have is publishing their information to the cloud. We ask users if they want to use this when they first upgrade to 1.2 and anytime they want afterwards they can go to the Settings page and disable the Library feature. All you are publishing is the information you have collected about beer. No personal identifiable information is ever sent. In fact at this point we haven’t even developed a good way to visualize the data. All we want to do is drink better beer, and Remembeer it for later.

One of the most common complaints / requests we have seen in the Android Market comments is that “Star Ratings get cut off” This is a very obnoxious bug for several reasons. First and foremost it makes it difficult to rate beers 5 stars, and we all want to be drinking more 5 star beers! Secondly, this is not our bug, we swear. It is a bug in the Android 1.5 platform, which was only designed for screens with a specific density of pixels. Droid and Nexus One users complain about this bug because one of the things that makes their phones great is the high density screen.

The only fix is to release a version of Remembeer which requires Android 1.6 or greater. We don’t want to alienate any of our users, but either way we are. With Remembeer 1.2 and beyond Remembeer will now require Android 1.6 or greater.

In the rush to get 1.1.3 out the door to fix the Internationalization issue a new issue was introduced. We have been talking a lot about more statistics and some of that code made it into the release even though it wasn’t working yet. A 1.1.4 update has been released so if you are still experiencing Force Closed when on the Statistics screen check for an update in the Android Market.

We have already started to develop a test suite for Remembeer, which we expect will be more and more important in the coming releases. Hopefully the test suite combined with some basic policies and procedures will keep us from publishing minor fixes over and over again.

One of the next things we are looking to add to Remembeer is more Statistics. We added fields for Brewery, Beer Style, and ABV, now we need to make use of them for additional Statistics. There are some we already have in mind, but what Statistic would you like to see? Add it as a comment below.

Remembeer 1.1.2 has been released. This release builds further on the new fields we added in 1.1, now saving the Brewery, ABV, Notes, and other additional information in the Export file as well. This should help keep all your information safe. Look for Remembeer 1.1.2 in the Android Market now.

Importing and Exporting your history added to Remembeer as a easy way for users to migrate from BeerLog and to deal with system upgrades from carriers or even load a third party ROM. Histories are saved as a Comma Separated Values (CSV) file which is a plain text file containing listing the beername, container, time stamp of when you drank it, and your rating.

From inside Remembeer’s History screen there is a menu item “Import/Export” which brings up the Import / Export dialog. That screen contains the date and time when the last export happened as well as options to “Export to Email” and “Export Locally”. Both of these options generate a CSV file stored on your SD card. Currently that file is named BeerLog_export.csv

Importing works much the same way. The Import / Export dialog has a button “Import Beers from local file” which currently loads the BeerLog_export.csv file and adds that to the history.

Since Import and Export was a feature added to support BeerLog users, they don’t currently support all the data that Remembeer collects. The Brewery and ABV information isn’t exported, and we have had some bug reports from our users about hand edited CSV files not being imported into the Remembeer log. Updating the Import and Export functionality is on our short list of features to work on in an upcoming release.

As was pointed out in the comments for our release of Remembeer 1.1 there was a pretty nasty bug that affected users with language set to anything other than English. It seems that when we released Remembeer 1.0.5 and we added French support that went off well, but with all the changes, and the many more strings that we added to the program, the localization code started acting up on us.

Late yesterday 1.1.1 was published to the Android Market, in that release we removed non-English support which fixes the crashing people were seeing in 1.1. We will continue to work to add back in support for French and would welcome help with translations into additional languages as well.

Thanks to everyone who wrote in about the issue, and a big thanks to Johan Vervloet for diagnosing a work around which helped us get an update out so quickly.

Thanks for everyone who wrote in suggesting we add more fields. We heard you, and after some major reworking we did it. Remembeer 1.1 is done and out, available now on the Android Market!

Now you can store not only the Beer name, and a rating for each time you have it, but you can also add all sorts of additional information like where you are or who you’re drinking with.

Even better than that you can add a ton more information about each beer, such as the brewery, where it is made, what style of beer it is, some tasting notes, even the alcohol content (our most requested feature!) This information get saved separately so you don’t have to type it in each time you “Drink Another” one of your favorites.

One of our most requested features has been the ability to put in more details about a beer: brewery, alcohol content, and general notes. We wanted to have this feature from the start, but we also wanted to get it right. After all, who wants to put in “Boston Beer Company” every single time they drink another Samuel Adams? We’re currently testing some alpha builds of Remembeer 1.1 which allow you to put in a whole bunch more details about a beer. We hope to get the last bugs tested and ironed out within the next week or so, but we wanted to give you guys a sneak peek at what’s in store.

[View with PicLens]

Thanks to Brian Clozel for providing our first translation, Remembière en francais!

Additionally we got some more of the features people have been asking for, Searching the History now works, and we tuned up the logic on Auto-Complete. Before it would present guesses in alphabetical order, now it returns its suggestions based on what you’ve been drinking the most. With Summer coming up I know that will help me Remembeer my Harpoon UFOs a lot better.