I’m a huge fan of the Total Tiki app for iOS: not only is it the best cocktail app I’ve seen, it’s one of the best iOS apps of any kind I’ve seen. It’s undeniably a limitation for folks who don’t have iPads/iPhones not to be able to use the app, so taking the jump to a web platform makes sense. I’m slightly bummed to have something else asking for a recurring subscription fee, but if you’re going to justify development time you’ve got to have a revenue stream, so I’m on board.
It will be challenging to create a similarly usable experience to the iOS app with the extra features of the web app. I must confess that my first impression of the app is that it’s rather overwhelming and not as polished as the iOS app, and that I should probably wait for some more iteration before trying to use it. (It doesn’t look like it has my favorite feature yet, which is the ability to search for recipes I can make with the current ingredients I have.) But I definitely understand how much work is involved, and how much effort is already represented in the impressively augmented filtering system.
For a paid, closed-source app, there’s probably not a viable way to collaborate with outside developers, but if I’m ever wrong about that, I’d love to pitch in. I’m a web developer / javascript engineer and web designer.
While I’m here, I’ll just drop a pitch for the dream feature I’ve always wanted from Total Tiki: the ability to use my phone’s camera to scan barcodes of bottles to add items to my bar inventory.
Glad you’re intrigued by Total Tiki Online. Yes, we’re all suffering from subscription fatigue, but here we are! Total Tiki Online combines growing, curated content with SAAS (software as a service), so subscription is where it’s at.
Mobile is a challenge for this service, particularly because we went deep on the features (and still more are coming). If we can build enough of a business, then we can probably have a focused (cross-platform) mobile app for it, one day, but in the meanwhile, we will keep trying to refine the mobile web experience to be as tolerable for as many people and circumstances as possible.
The “drinks you can make” feature is already fully baked into Total Tiki Online! You get the exact same green and red dots as on the Total Tiki app, and you can filter out all the red ones if you choose: just punch the green dot in the recipe list filter controls.
Unlike the Total Tiki app for iOS, you can use the same filter controls on your recipes lists, too. Really, the only feature I can think from the Total Tiki app that isn’t both already on Total Tiki Online and improved is the “Increase your options” feature, and we’re going to blow that out of the water. For a glimpse of why, check out the “Ingredient Reports” item on the main menu of Total Tiki Online.
Regarding the bottle scanning idea: I actually did that before years ago on an iOS app I had called My Bar. The scanning worked, and it was interesting, but it was also not a panacea. It was cumbersome enough that it clearly saved no time under most circumstances. I’m open to revisiting it in the future, though. I want to point out that the quick search feature on Total Tiki Online is extremely fast: you just type a few letters and you can call up anything. It’s probably going to be hard to beat.
Mobile is a challenge for this service, particularly because we went deep on the features (and still more are coming). If we can build enough of a business, then we can probably have a focused (cross-platform) mobile app for it, one day, but in the meanwhile, we will keep trying to refine the mobile web experience to be as tolerable for as many people and circumstances as possible.
I can absolutely understand how much extra time/work mobile is for feature-dense interfaces; on the other hand, I far prefer to use my phone when I’m at my bar mixing drinks. For me, UI design focused on breakpoints and adaptibility is always my preferred target: I try to make things as width-flexible as possible, with optimizations here and there when things need to work differently enough in narrow widths.
The “drinks you can make” feature is already fully baked into Total Tiki Online! You get the exact same green and red dots as on the Total Tiki app, and you can filter out all the red ones if you choose: just punch the green dot in the recipe list filter controls.
Thanks for pointing me in the right direction! That’s great. I definitely would not have found that on my own – that can be one challenge in having buttons that are just images rather than text. Tooltips could help make the controls more discoverable, though (speaking of mobile) those don’t help people using touchscreens.
Regarding the bottle scanning idea: I actually did that before years ago on an iOS app I had called My Bar. The scanning worked, and it was interesting , but it was also not a panacea. It was cumbersome enough that it clearly saved no time under most circumstances. I’m open to revisiting it in the future, though. I want to point out that the quick search feature on Total Tiki Online is extremely fast: you just type a few letters and you can call up anything. It’s probably going to be hard to beat.
Interesting! I’ve never tried actually implementing such a system, I just always wanted to. It’s absolutely true that your quick search is really speedy, and I didn’t find it terribly difficult to use. On the other hand, I still find it a chore to try to find the right keyword and then to find the right match from the list of items that comes up. I think I’d really love to be able, at least some of the time, to have the ease of a single action to a single, clear result.
But, you know, you can’t always take users’ expressed wishes as gospel: sometimes what we think we want is not what we really need.
