I have been remiss in documenting changes and updates to Total Tiki Online, but the last couple months have been seriously intense leading up to and into our soft-launch.
I’m pleased to report there have been few major problems. One continues to irritate, as of this writing, but I will detail that in a separate thread. A few of our customers have already helped us track down and fix some run-of-the-mill bugs. Many thanks to them!
In summary, since the launch, there have been many small updates to the software side of the site, but the big ones are:
miscellaneous (ongoing) improvements to mobile UX (user eXperience), by which we mean how easy and pleasant it is to use Total Tiki Online on a phone, held normally (portrait orientation)
Oh boy… of course I forgot, we did add a rather major feature to TTOL a few weeks ago: multiple inventories.
You can now maintain up to three separate ingredient inventories plus a forth (under testing, coming soon) for sync with the Total Tiki app for iPhone and iPad.
This is a big deal for those with multiple homes, but it’s also a boon for event planning.
Only one inventory can be active at a time, and you can switch between them in the Preferences form. We recommend giving each a nickname so you don’t get confused about which inventory is active (the nickname will appear in various places around the site to remind you which context you’re in).
We’ve continued to roll out new content, mostly in the form of vintage imagery from Beachbum Berry’s collection.
We’re going to stop calling it “early access” since the site has actually been quite stable.
The biggest new feature, recently, has been sync middleware so that those with the Total Tiki app for iPhone and iPad can enjoy synchronization of their inventory, lists and notes between the app and Total Tiki Online. See here for more information.
At the moment, we’re tinkering with session invalidation timeouts in attempt to reduce how often you must log in. (Annoyance factor.)
Been updating the ingredients database, here and there. Also, added a new “top results” feature to quick search that floats the most popular ingredients (based on inventories and usage in recipes) to a list at the top, so you don’t have to hunt through some long search results for obvious items.
New features: you can now sort recipes by Date added (handy for finding the newest additions, whether in the curated content or in your private recipes)
There’s also a new sorting option for Last Modified, but that’s more for curators, Enterprise customers and users managing large numbers of private recipes.
Deployed improvements—bug fixes, really—to the handling of subrecipes/preparations, specifically toward preserving their names throughout the complex processes. Hopefully fewer confusing surprises and hopefully no nasty regression bugs.
Deployed some subtle layout changes and refinements to the recipe pages.
The biggest change is that the list of ingredients you’re missing or need to substitute is now moved to the righthand sidebar in “desktop” presentation. (It remains inserted in the recipe for mobile users.) Hopefully, this change won’t drive anyone crazy.
Rolling out some work relating to rescaling ingredient recipes and better supporting metric preferences. Still a number of loose ends to work out, but there’s progress.
Added descriptions/explanations to auto drink type keywords (Total Mixology only). This experimental feature is still under development/refinement, but already produces some interesting results.
Deployed a major optimization to speed up situations with pages and pages of recipes. This particularly benefits Total Mixology, but has also sped up Total Tiki Online.
The changes required a different approach to the random recipe feature. Further adjustments may be required.
As feared, there was a regression bug I missed and everyone’s recipe lists started crashing. Fixed that, I think/hope.
On the plus side, our keywording game—already strong—is now set to get a lot stronger, particularly with people (mainly bartenders) and places (mainly bars). More on this soon.
