Tap Cellar The Next Generation
Just got a big update. Many of the user requests and I have received have included things like bar-code scanning and list sharing, as well as several performance improvements, fixes, and enhancements. With over 45,000 beers available for your offline searching and perusing, it has gotten a lot more useful for those of you who care about what we call “anti-social” beer drinking.
Many of you don’t care about sharing your latest beer escapades with the world at large. You might share a suggestion or two with a group of close friends or make a note or grade a beer to remind yourself that you had a beer at one point, but social sharing isn’t a focus. That is where TapCellar works best. It functions as a personal diary, library, and cellar manager for your beer experiences. If you’ve been on the fence, now is a good time to try TapCellar. That said, we’re introducing something with this version that might raise a few eyebrows.
With this release, we are making our features in-app purchase. For those of you buying the app prior to this release, and for the next month, you will get all of the TapCellar features that we consider key to managing your beer experience, including the in-app features. You’ll also get all future upgrades and new features going forward. For now, this will set you back $4.99. To enable this switch for current users, the in-app “Pro” feature unlocks will be free for a month. For current and brand new users, just “purchase” these features from within the app for $0 and then, when the pricing tiers change (at the end of September), you’ll own them forever.
After a month, we will be changing the price of the base app to $.99 with the Pro features setting you back $3.99. For those of you good at math, you’ll see that the price of the app isn’t changing, but we’re just lowering the barrier to entry for those of you who want to try the app without making such a huge financial commitment. We think you’ll like the app enough to unlock the Pro features. Here are the release notes:
It’s been a great summer for beer, and we’ve been hard at work trying to drink them all. We’ve also been hard at work adding some cool new features and cleaning out a bunch of floaters.
Barcode Scanning TapCellar now has an optional feature to help you find beers faster. We can scan barcodes off most beer bottles and cans to find them in the database. Barcode scanning requires a network connection.
Share as a List. We made this feature for ourselves and think it’s super cool. While viewing any list of fewer than 200 beers, you can export a plain text version using iOS sharing. That means you can quickly text someone your top beers or post the spoils of a really good Asheville beer-cation.
Improvements
TapCellar now includes over 45,000 beers, and it’s all available offline. We work where you drink. Syncing should be much faster now. All of the data is still local, but we try to go out and get the latest data every day. Syncing requires the to be active, but we think we’ve made it much faster, so you’ll always be up to date. We fixed a bunch of bugs with data export and import. Our testers drink a lot. Err, I mean, they are great at testing large exports. You can now purge label image caches if you’ve viewed a bunch of labels and want to save some space
Pricing
We’ve changed the pricing model. The app is now much cheaper but offers an in-app purchase for some of the new hotness. To celebrate, the in-app purchase price is free as in beer. An Apple Music Article I Agree With Here’s a good Apple Music article on Cult of Mac. Apple Music meets this simple, basic desire. I launch it on my iPhone or via iTunes on my Mac, and I check out For You. I look at the new playlists that show up. Are they interesting? Most of the time, they are. I hit play. I hear new and familiar tunes all in a row; I rarely need to skip tracks. It’s instant, and has thoroughly replaced my radio in the car; something or never really did. When I want to find an album or a song I want to hear, I use Search. I’ve only had one instance of not finding what I want so far, the catalog is huge. I can download albums to my iPhone with a simple tap; it’s as good as owning the songs for my level of listening.