101 Cocktails

I am so excited to announce this application: 101 Cocktails. I worked very hard with Jimmy Patrick on this application. Months of implementation, bug fixes, feature improvements, recipe improvements, database updates, and of course, testing the cocktails. Perhaps all of the drinking made this take longer?

The idea behind the app was Jimmy’s, and was intended to give the consumer only the best cocktails. After all, who cares if there are 10,000 cocktails in the application if over 9900 were totally undrinkable. We toiled for hours on taking the right photos (after hours at the L&C mostly), and spent hours on honing the user experience of the application itself.

The Basics

The application is very easy to use. When you run it the first time, you simply get a high resolution image of the first cocktail in the database. Use your finger to swipe left or right. Swiping left goes to the previous cocktail and swiping to the right goes to the next cocktail. Pretty simple, no? So, you have the name and the look of the cocktail, but what about the recipe itself? There are two ways to get the recipe, but I’ll only describe one of them here.

Rotate the iPhone 90 degrees (landscape)

This will reduce the photo in size, and give you a scrolling view of the recipe and other notes. This is the most interesting view for bartenders and users to see what the ingredients are for a specific cocktail. In fact, Jimmy used this the other day to see how to make a Red Lion for my wife (she said it was delicious).

Shake the device

Another great thing about the accelerometer is that you can have gestures like shaking. In our application you can shake the device to get a random cocktail. When you shake the device, you should hear a cocktail shaker sound, and the device will vibrate.

Rating your cocktail

By default, all of the drinks are unrated (zero stars). However, when you try a cocktail and enjoy it, you should give it a rating. Likewise, if you do not like the cocktail, rate it as well. I use a 1 star for something I don’t really like, and 4 stars for something I really enjoy. That way I can tell the difference between a cocktail I’ve never tried (zero stars [aka unrated]) and one that I dislike (one star).

Listing all cocktails

Sometimes you may just want a text list of all of the cocktails. Just tap on the actions button (bottom right of the application), and the application will pop up a list of actions: List Drinks and Send Recipe. Tap the List Drinks button, and you will be able to list the drinks alphabetically, list them by ratings, or even search for a specific type of drink. When finished, just tap on the name and you will bounce to that recipe.

Tell your friends

When you find a recipe that you really love, tell your friends about it. Tap on the actions button, then tap on the Send Recipe button. This will launch your iPhone mail application, with the contents of the drink, a link to the drink image, and a way for your friends to purchase the 101 Cocktails application. You just type in the email address(es), and press Send. Your friends will be amazed by your technological prowess!

Advanced Features

As an engineer, I’ve been at the giving end of last minute features, as well as the receiving end of some last minute features. We had quite a few of these for this application, and I have to say that these features really made this application. I will lightly describe these features below. To enable many of these features, you need to enable some features in Settings. Go to Settings (the built-in iPhone application), scroll down to 101 Cocktails and turn everything ON.

Twitter Support

Some times you just want to tell people what you’re drinking. By installing Twitterrific on your phone, and by turning on the Twitterrific Support in the settings application. Once you have enabled this, you will see a new button in the Actions screen.

Recipe in Portrait View

The default way the application works is by showing you the recipe only when you turn the device on its side. However, there’s one option in the Settings application for the Recipe Popup. Setting this to ON will allow you to tap on the image to get a recipe to popup for 4 seconds. Tap the X if you want it to go away sooner.

On Load Cocktail

There are three options you have when launching the 101 Cocktails application: You can show a random cocktail, you can show the cocktail you last viewed, or you can show the highest rated cocktail. Choose one of these options from the Settings application.

Background Color

There are two options here, black or white. Choose which ever one excites you most.

Transitions

The great thing about the iPhone SDK is that you have numerous options for moving from one view to the next. We’ve made that very simple by putting in a whole list of transition types. Choose them here in the Settings application.

Vibration Support

When you shake the device, it vibrates. Modify this feature here in the Settings application.

This was an exciting application to work on, and Jimmy has many ideas for it. Hopefully the mixographer team will be able to make this a top selling application. To help move things along, Jimmy has put together a bunch of ads, as seen here.

Tags: cocktails, drinks, mixographer

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 10th, 2009 at 9:30 pm and is filed under Entertainment. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.