New features coming…
We’ve had literally hundreds of feedback requests for new features. This makes us very happy. It means people are using the app and care enough to make their opinion known.
Here’s a brief glimpse of our next release, followed by a usability question. Please send us your comments!
Top requested features:
- Cellar filtering
- Shared Cellars
- Cellar synchronization for offline use
- Custom wine entry in Cellar
- Editable fields
- More reviews (not really a feature, but a request nonetheless)
The good news - we’re gunna do most of them (and some other cool stuff), in our next release.
The question I’d like to put out there is around “Cellar filtering”. Most of the wine apps, whether on the web or phone, allow you to choose one or more categories to filter by i.e. region, style, grape, year. You apply the filter and get a new list. It’s pretty straightforward, but not very “iPhone-like” and doesn’t allow for filtering on other text that may exist in a wine record, like your personal notes.
Another approach would be to put a ’search’ box up there and let users type in whatever they want. We could enable type-ahead for common filtering terms to reduce typing on the iPhone. This approach is super flexible for the user, a very common iPhone paradigm, but requires typing, which many iPhone users despise.
What do you think? Send us your thoughts - it’ll make a difference, I promise.
Great! this is what is missing. I have being comparing Drync wine with previous applications I filtering is a big issue. Specially if you have a lot of wines and can remember exactly which wine I have.
Cant wait too see the update , keep up the great job!
agreed, cellar filtering is key. i also concur that searche box would not be as nice as categories to choose from. one category that i haven’t seen mentioned is ‘# bottles’. that might help in deciding what to open. also, i imagine for someone with a very large cellar, they’d want to be able to do multiple sorts. e.g. first by year, then by rating. i’m thinking of an urbanspoon style mechanism.
lastly, i think you need to find a way to dedupe/redundancy filer your vast listings of wines. i realize this is hard, but it would improve the search function dramatically.
I had a lot of fun with Drync at the Boston Wine Expo last weekend!
Hi folks. I think search is required at a bare minimum. It’d be nice to be able to choose a filter from a drop-down menu *as well* but what if I remember only the name of the wine but not the exact blend?
If you could incorporate predictive searching (e.g., the search function in the App Store app) that would be the sweetest solution. I don’t think you need to worry too much about iPhone users “despising” typing.
My $.05 (inflation, dontcha know)
-j.
It would be nice to have a way to import photos from the roll. I have a bunch of photos of wine labels from another wine app I abandoned in favor of Drync Wine.
To your usability question. I like the idea of a search field with predictive searches, similar Google. Google uses the popularity of search terms from all users to decide what to present which might be cool for Drync. It might also be good to allow users to choose to only use the popularity of their searches to determine weighting in your predictive algorithm.
I also second the request for photos, especially in quick notes. Sometimes you want to just snap a (geotagged) pic of a label and get back to the socializing.
If the next gen iphone has a better camera then having a barcode lookup would be great.
Keep up the good work on a great app!
Sorry, in my last post I meant to say “take a picture quickly”. For me it seems to take a very long time to take a picture and is has been a bit unstable.
Brad - sit tight for about 1 more week on this one
Mark -
Great suggestions. v2.0 will be released to Apple this week and holds lots of great new stuff addressing some of your comments.
Thanks very much for submitting the comments.
I have my own Cellar list in a Filemaker application with years of data.
Is there a way to import this into Drync?
Is there a way to backup or work with data on my Mac?
I’d like a field for price paid in my cellar along with the current average price or auction price for a bottle. This is very helpful in deciding if a wine is a drink at home with dinner or save for a special occasion.
Perhaps also a field for wine status (Drink now, cellar through 2012, etc)
The search mechanism is very good. But how about
1) synrchronization or an export feature for off-line use? That’s crucial.
2) web access to the cellars? In other words, customers should be able to access and edit their cellars from this website. That seems obvious, no?
3) landscape orientation typing
Joe
If there was a desktop (or web-based) companion with sync, export and print functionality, I’d be in heaven.
I need a website for backup of my database!!!! I really like using this app but I hate that if other things I do on my iPhone cause me to have to restore my phone and not retrieve from an itunes backup. I would love to be able to retrieve my data with an account as well as have access to an online version of my cellar via the web with more robust search and recommend tools based on my previous purchases and ratings
It’s coming! Look for it in the next few months!
We’ll be adding a web based feature in the coming months as well as accounts to allow you to synch.
HI Joe,
A web site is coming that will allow you to add and edit your wines. As for landscape orientation, we’ll add that to our list of features!
Thanks for your feedback!
Eric
Hi Dusty,
Thanks for you feedback, sorry for the delayed response. We’ll add these suggestions to our feature list for the coming version!
Eric
Hi Jay,
Sorry for the delayed response. We’re going to be adding a website to drync very soon. As part of that, we’ll be adding import/export, though that may not come in the first version. Thanks for your feedback!
Eric