Ok, so I’ve been intermittently working on an iPhone webapp that may or may not make it into production…
I’ll start by saying that I’m a big fan of trying a lot of different kinds of beer, but at the same time, I hate finding out that I what I bought sucks. In its current form, the webapp allows you to search for a certain beer/brewery and provides a rating from BeerAdvocate.com.
Load up safari and visit ‘findgoodbeer.com’ from your iPhone/iPod touch and let me know what you think. Here are some questions to consider:
Would you use it?
How were the search results (did it find what you were looking for)?
Is it easy to use?
As of right now, the code is pretty dirty and probably won’t work fully in most desktop browsers (especially IE).
Isn’t there like 20 apps in the AppStore already that do this exact same thing?
There is one for alcoholic drinks and one for beers that is like the Urbanspoon of drinking. Pick one you like and it will show you a list of beers just like it. Also comments and rankings of each beer.
The apps on the AppStore have their own databases which pale in comparison to data from BeerAdvocate. And the decent ones aren’t free, which will also prevent a lot of cheap bastards like myself from using them.
Between Wegmans and Consumer’s its like a constant struggle for me…feel free to use it as you please.
Unfortunately, I’m not 100% happy with some of the search results, but there’s not much I can do at the moment because Google’s API kind of sucks :banghead:
Its also a very good idea to use the BeerAdvocate database, as a lot of those kinds of apps on the appstore expect miracles from user maintained databases, which are always pitifully small. BeerAdvocate is pretty much the best resource for it.
There has been a few times where I’ve tried to go to BeerAdvocate on my phone, and had to go through the hassle of logging in just to search, and then its a pain. Big thanks for taking all that hassle out of it.
BeerAdvocate is awesome, but from the little iPhone screen, it’s definitely not that easy to quickly find the rating. It also takes longer to load as far as I can tell. If you do want to read individual reviews, all you need to do is click on the rating box and it’ll take you the BA page.
Basically, I’m just waiting for BA to give me permission to do this, and then I’ll go ahead and clean the app up a bit. Until then though, it’ll remain online for anyone that wishes to use it.