Added a direct link to “Newest additions” in the recipe library section—this invokes the “Browse All” but sorted from more recent to least recent.
Implemented a more prominent presentation of favorites/likes/dislikes on the recipe page.
Been doing lots of keywording and content clean-up work behind the scenes.
Two recent deployments:
First, Stories are evolving. (They’ll probably get a new name, too, once we find one we don’t hate.) The changes are fundamentally presentational, but we’re also starting to figure out what they are (and aren’t).
We’ve already got a pretty good set of these comparative presentations for the Total Tiki content. We’re just getting started on the cocktail content.
Second, we’ve deployed the first generation of our “similar recipes” feature. This is still experimental, and for now we’re only showing it on Total Mixology, not Total Tiki Online. Basically, you navigate to any recipe, and at the bottom there may (or may not) be a presentation like that below, listing similar recipes from a common-ingredient perspective.
These lists are analytically-defined, and these recipes don’t necessarily have any historical relationship, but it’s an interesting way to surf through objective parallelisms. Our approach has various shortcomings, some of which we’ve already identified. We’ll probably replace it with a superior approach down the line, but for now, there’s value here.
For a while now, recipes on TTOL/TM have listed their Standard Drinks scores (based on the USA standard—I can add other standards if there’s demand). I’ve now also added Units of Alcohol:
I’ve just deployed two related new features for recipe lists:
These are what I would call “minimum viable” implementations, but I think I got the intent right. Basically, you can create a list of recipes—say, for a party—and then Total Tiki Online/Total Mixology will give you a leg up on creating both a menu for the party and a spec sheet (“cheat sheet”/“crib sheet”) for use behind the bar. For each, there’s a template you can edit, and then you can download a docx (Microsoft Word) file that has paragraph and character styles already set up so you can easily stylize the document to taste.
There’s a lot more I could do with these, but I plan to wait for some customer feedback before elaborating them much more.
We’ve been testing a design cleanup-and-overhaul on Total Mixology for a couple weeks. Today, the updates were applied to Total Tiki Online. Lots and lots of little changes in service to better mobile support and making future development easier. The main “marquee” feature is there’s now a dark mode for them that wants it.
Added a new presentation for recent recipe additions to the database. An excerpt is now included in the news feed with links to the full list there and in the main menu.
The private recipe edit form now includes two additional fields flanking the recipe body field: Text before recipe and Text after recipe. These are boxes to (optionally) add verbiage before and/or after the body of the recipe. Unlike the body of the recipe, these fields are disregarded by the Autotemplate feature.
Iterative work on autotype category logic, focusing on the collins family. Tricky stuff, but we’re slowly tightening the bolts.
New base ingredient keywords added: coffee, tea and beer
Happy to report that the recipes from Wondrich’s Index of Punch have made their way to Total Mixology (with @Splificator’s blessing, of course), split across new historical and contemporary collections. Accomplishing this has required some conservative expansion of the available syntax for batch drinks. I’m fairly pleased how it went, although batch recipe handling still feels a little undercooked to me. In any case, the new syntax appears adequate to support the calculations and keywording requirements of this seminal assortment of recipes.
Today, I deployed the first iteration of the dreaded (by me) hamburger menu.
I never wanted to do this, but it has become clear that customers really really want to use Total Tiki Online and Total Mixology on their phones. So, now every page gets the burger. Even on tablets and desktop. So now you can get just about anywhere from anywhere without going to the home page. Moreover, phone users will now see the news feed on the home page.
It’s better this way.
We’ve begun experimental support for slushy machine recipes in Total Mixology. There are a few examples up (see “slushy machine” keyword). For now the essentials are: batch recipes only, ingredients must wind up in the --mixing vessel-- context, and then terminated with the “Freeze in slushy machine” syntax component.
TTOL / TM now has elementary support for handling acidity calculations with powdered acids. TM customers can see this in action on the Bird of Paradise recipe and its preparations. Caveats:
As of this writing, the sweetness calculation of the Bird of Paradise is getting thrown wildly off by the Raspberry Syrup preparation, which depends on a whole fruit juice extraction the system does not (and may never) take into account; consequently, the estimated sugar concentration of this syrup is way high; solution will probably be to replace the preparation recipe with an ingredient database entry—either the generic “raspberry syrup” or a special recipe based on the specific method from Tropical Standard
These acidity calculations are not, and will never be, lab-grade. Rather, they’re useful approximations for practical comparisons of the taste experience. Your tongue is not a ph meter, and its sensitivity to acidity is wildly non-linear. This is all discussed in Dave Arnold’s Liquid Intelligence.
First phase of overhaul of flavors is live. This first step was simply taming the rather disorderly flavor pages, and that meant organizing the flavor affinities, which are now grouped. Here’s an example from the “cherry” flavor page.
The flavors filter page is also rearranged with some color added. I think it falls just short of color coding, and I’m comfortable with that. Color coding is generally not a good thing, and after exploring the arbitrary and meaningless color schemes from the likes of The Flavor Matrix and others, I just went with my own.
Likewise, flavor clouds for recipes now reflect the same colors:
There’s no timetable for the second phase, but hopefully in the future we can do some more sophisticated things with flavors and recipes. Meanwhile, there’s plenty here to tinker with.
An additional small change is to the layout of the primary (General) filter page, which ditches the columnar layout for a vertical array of grids. Reasoning: columnar web layouts still don’t really work that well, technically speaking, despite being nothing new—there are layout bugs or shortcomings that nobody seems in a hurry to fix—and they lead to a lot of up/down scrolling for the user. Depending how this change wears, we may apply a similar approach to Persons, Places and some other situations around the UI.
Deployed a bunch of small UX improvements:
This week, we’re introducing Formulas to Total Mixology and Total Tiki Online. Formulas are easily the most significant feature addition since we launched the services a few years ago.
In essence, a Formula is just an ingredient—of the “homemade” sort—with a (simplified) recipe integrated into it. This seemingly minor difference brings with it a lot of nuanced implications.
You’ll find the Formulas integrated with the rest of the ingredients database, and adorned with a beaker icon.
You can add and remove Formulas from your inventory and lists like any other ingredient, and employ them in your private recipes. You can also find all the Formulas in one place by choosing Formulas in the main menu.
In addition, every Formula comes with its own built-in calculator that will rescale it for you into your prefered quantities and units. You can scale by the yield you desire, or by the quantity you have of one of the components of the ingredient. For example, if the formula calls for 15 g of cinnamon bark but you only have 11 g, the calculator will instantly provide the other proportional measurements you need.
One of the main reasons we added Formulas is to get as far away as possible from subrecipes. Subrecipes are a necessary evil: they’re the only way to handle some situations. However, subrecipes are cumbersome in general, and particularly so for common, multi-use preparations. Worst of all, they only work for recipes within the same collection—they aren’t universal—a crippling limitation.
A second reason we added Formulas is that we often have multiple competing choices—different formulas—for a common preparation. Now we can now offer discrete approaches (e.g., to ginger syrup), provide proper citations for each, and enable you to easily explore them and fine the formula you prefer. It just works.
Finally, a big reason we’re introducing Formulas is that homemade preparations are a more important part of mixology, today, than twenty years ago. We’re launching with about forty Formulas, but we expect that quantity to triple in coming months. The breadth of our formula collection will grow, but so will its depth. The intent is to be an authoritative repository for them. We’re starting to work our way through a known backlog, but we also take requests. If there’s a useful preparation that’s important to you, please let us know.
