

Show HN: Picky Pint – Scan beer lists with a photo - mp_mn
http://www.pickypint.com/

======
jcr
Bravo! The site is beautiful and unusually complete. You've put in a lot of
thought and work, and it shows. The press release for today was a nice touch.
It's great to see the choice of iOS and Android as well as free and paid
versions. I have no idea how many "beer ratings" apps are out there with a
menu snapshot feature, but it's a wonderful idea.

Suggestion #1: Describe what we get for the paid "Pro" version. At present,
your site only says there's a "Free" version and a "Pro" version, but does not
differentiate between the two.

(Note To Self: Do I really want the "Professional" version of a drinking app
on my phone? -- Hmmm.... Decisions, Decisions, ;-)

Suggestion #2: Give a bit more information about the ratings and reviews, like
where they come from.

Suggestion #3: I know there's a craft brewers association of some sort in the
US (I saw it in a documentary I watched a while ago). It might be a useful
source of data, particularly for the more esoteric, seasonal, and limited run,
brews. I _think_ the following is the group site:

[http://www.brewersassociation.org/](http://www.brewersassociation.org/)

Good Luck!

~~~
mp_mn
Agreed, and done.

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dfan
I'd love to see ABV on the main list (instead of having to go to that beer's
individual page). When I'm scanning through a menu, that's one of the primary
things I look at.

~~~
twic
Perhaps instead of a straight quantitative ABV, a qualitative indication of
whether a beer is unusually weak or strong? Like you, i always look at ABV -
mostly because i don't want to get started on some delicious 8% turbo-IPA if
it's a thursday lunchtime.

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joshyeager
Pretty cool idea. I don't have a beer menu here to test with, but the search
is very fast.

One critique: your website doesn't explain the difference between Free and
Pro. I had to go to the App Store to find that info, which took a lot longer.

One suggestion: add other dimensions for sorting besides bitterness. There are
a lot of things other than bitterness that distinguish different styles.

One feature request: Let me track my own ratings and view them later. This is
the first beer app that feels fast enough to use for tracking my own beer
ratings. I love tracking books I've read in Goodreads because it makes it easy
to find them again. I want to do the same thing for beer, but the apps I've
tried (Pintly and BeerAdvocate) have been painfully slow and hard to use.

~~~
thekingofspain
The difference is listed on their homepage, but I agree it's not super
obvious. EDIT: maybe it was added just now?

~~~
mp_mn
Yep, added it in response to another comment, and the parent comment was
posted a minute or so before the fix was sent up.

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gentlebend
Great, now bars will start implementing MITM attacks on their wifi routers to
steer you to yesterday's flat keg.

~~~
deltaecho1338
You could use a VPN, or Picky Pint could encrypt its connection... does it?

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josephjrobison
You've got to be kidding me - 5 days ago I was looking at a long beer list
from random brewers at Porter Ale House in Austin and thought of this exact
same idea. The rise of hipster craft brew places with constantly rotating
lists and rarely listing ABV makes this absolutely necessary.

Very excited that I can stop dreaming of it existing and use your version!

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organsnyder
I don't have a menu handy, so I tried taking a picture of the example on your
website on my monitor. The first time, it said the picture wasn't clear
enough, but the second time, it's stayed hung on "Scanning now..." for over
five minutes so far. Nexus 5 running Android 5.0 stock, connected to wifi.

As I was about to submit the comment, it finally finished processing,
returning a list of beers that weren't in the original menu image. Not
surprised, given the poor quality inherent to taking a picture of a low-res
picture on a low-density LCD screen, so the only issue I see here is how long
it took to process the image.

Great idea—looking forward to trying it at the pub tonight (hopefully I'll
have better success there).

~~~
mp_mn
Yeah, if you take a photo of a menu displayed on a standard monitor you tend
to get a screen door effect on the photo, which lowers accuracy. It does work
much better on high density monitors (and other high density tablet and phone
screens), though, and of course physical menus.

------
jsm386
Very cool! This is like the beer version of WineGlass
([http://wineglassapp.com/](http://wineglassapp.com/))! They managed to get
ratings from CellarTracker via private access to their API (like Beer Advocate
they don't offer anything publicly), so from the start that had access to the
largest? library of user generated wine ratings on the web.

Are you blending user ratings with the ratebeer ratings in screenshots, or
keeping them separate?

Wineglass has a feature I thought was pretty neat -- letting you know whether
or not the price was 'fair for a restaurant' given typical industry markups.
Perhaps not as applicable to beer, but could be a cool feature. And then you
could surface 'bars with the best deals on beers you'll love.'

I'm in online wine media, so not as familiar with the beer space but it seems
like lots of areas for collaboration (eg Nextglass, Untapped, BeerMenus.com as
a fallback for OCR fails)

P.S. I understand the need to monetize, but having used heavily/played with
dozens of apps in the wine/beer/liquor space, both free and paid, its rare to
see random iAds (so far Target.com, some casino game install ad, and another
casino game install ad. Perhaps the revenue is worth it but feels like there
are much more interesting ways to monetize (native ads in terms of featured
beers/all sorts of brewery/bar partnerships) than that sort of junky ad...

------
deltaecho1338
I was not able to find your privacy policy. Are you tracking what beers I'm
looking up? Where I am? How long I spend drinking? Are you serving ads
generally or are they somehow targeted to me based on my behavior? Do I get
more privacy with the pro version?

You will be collecting data that will be useful to other people besides me. I
don't care if statistics on all app users are sold but if you want to sell
things based on my specific behavior I won't use your app.

All that said I'm excited to give it a try.

------
yarri
Nice job & congratulations on shipping! Some brief feedback before I start
field testing :-) this...

\- Would love the ability to save a collection of favorites, maybe add folders
or tagging?

\- I often get asked to create list of recommended craft beers and so would
like the ability to share these lists easily

\- Your data will be sparse to start with, but I'd be interested in knowing
how many other users put beers into their favorites (I find the BeerAdvocate
listings a bit tedious to wade through...)

\- Not sure you want to, but the professional brewers I speak to are
interested in a lower-cost alternative to Untappd [0] and you might be able to
build a business here?

\- Maybe this is an East Coast US thing, but there's a growing trend to pair
beers with cheese [1]; maybe that's too specific a request but allowing used
to add notes to the beers (meta data beyond BeerAdvocate) might be useful

Good luck!

[0] [https://untappd.com/business](https://untappd.com/business) [1]
[http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/02/25/beer-cheese-
pairing...](http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/02/25/beer-cheese-
pairing_n_4849070.html)

------
dreyfiz
So, is this a RubyMotion app? (Asking because I'm curious, they recently
released Android support in addition to iOS/OS X).

Regardless of whether or not you're using RubyMotion, would you like to share
any comments or experiences about developing and releasing the app for both
iOS and Android at the same time? I think it's remarkable, it seems like
people pick either iOS or Android to launch. A lot of small iOS shops don't
even build their Android versions in-house, they will contract the Android
version out to an Android firm.

Great work on this app, I love it! Will try it out in the real world later
today.

~~~
mp_mn
Picky Pint is native both ways. I've been making iOS apps professionally since
2011 (in a great consultancy that does native on both platforms in-house), so
that part was straightforward. My co-founder and I both are software guys but
we hadn't tried a native Android app before, and this was as good of an
opportunity as any.

I'm pretty happy with how it came out!

------
brettkc
Do you integrate with Beer Advocate or Untappd for your ratings?

Great idea, good luck!

~~~
mp_mn
Not yet, but there's always time in the future :)

~~~
rgoodwintx
Purchased! Consider it another vote for BeerAdvocate :)

------
Jonovono
Awesome! Can't wait to try this out. Something that I wouldn't mind added
would be to keep like a history of all the beers you have seen and the places
you saw them at so if I am craving my favorite beer I can quickly see what
spots near me i've been to have it, but then you could crowdsource it and
search any restaurants anyone has been to to see if they have certain beers.
Just a thought.

Oh, and if they are bottles the normal ml in the bottle and the ABV and a
score saying best buy for your buck :p

Thanks for making this!

 __* heads off to the bar __ _

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t413
Very similar to WhatWine App
([http://www.whatwineapp.com](http://www.whatwineapp.com)): ocr menu parsing
and reviews / recommendations. Cool! (Not my app, just saw it at a hackathon)

------
steakejjs
So this looked really great and I'm sure it will be. I realize that there are
a lot of barcodes, but I happened to see this thread while at Costco. I
downloaded the app while here and it only recognized 2 beers from the entire
beer isle.

Some were tricky but some were things that you definitely should have (like
Sam Adams Winter). This will be really great when it's more complete but there
is still some work to do

~~~
mp_mn
Yep, working on it. We get bar code data from BreweryDB, which allows us to
improve bar code accuracy without an app update.

BreweryDB takes user submitted bar codes easily with PocketBeer (BreweryDB's
app) [http://www.pocketbeerapp.com/](http://www.pocketbeerapp.com/)

~~~
steakejjs
Cool stuff. Really like the app.

------
jsumrall
Awesome! I just finished a project doing beer recommendations, and I wanted to
use the RateBeer data but they put up a notice that they were not giving out
API access anymore. We went with BreweryDB and were trying to add some ratings
ourselves, which was sufficient for our project.

How did you get the use of RateBeers API?

------
chuckcode
Very refreshing idea! I can't tell from the site if you let users upload their
own ratings after trying a pint but I think that would a great feature and
also a great independent source of reviews for the app.

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strick
Cool! would be nice if I could select a photo I have already taken from inside
the app. [http://www.sipsnapp.com/](http://www.sipsnapp.com/) has this feature
and I use it.

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PeterWhittaker
I shall download forthwith! I look forward to being able to sort by IBU and
screen out anything below whatever my current threshold happens to be (runs
between 40 and 80, depending on the day).

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fuzionmonkey
Similar to SipSnapp [1]. The UI looks much better, though.

[1] [http://www.sipsnapp.com/](http://www.sipsnapp.com/)

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colinbartlett
This is really nice work. Good job.

Do you have plans to utilize the data for anything else? That could scare me
and excite me at the same time.

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twic
Fantastic stuff! Now all you need to do is train your OCR to decipher the
scrawl on the blackboards at the Euston Tap ...

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_nickwhite
What are your thoughts on rolling this out to Windows Phone? A lot of us are
stuck (or choose to be) on the platform.

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pierreski
Nice! This even sorts by bitterness and rating. It can even filter based on
personal bitterness preferences.

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macleodan
It would be good if you could flag which ones are vegan, or only show vegan
results.

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codereflection
This is a fantastic idea! Is there a specific requirement for Android 4.2+?

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adamio
What are you using for OCR?

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amit_m
What library/API did you use for OCR?

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egonschiele
Downloaded. Can't wait to try it out!

