Thursday is Teahouse/Tea Room, Accessory and Brand Review Day!

I’ve been on a roll with reviewing these iPhone and iPod Touch applications lately. There seem to be more everyday and each is a little different. Some provide custom timer options, others limit you to specified choices. How does Tea Timer by Decane fare?

Every tea timer application seeks to differentiate itself. In fact, it’s the very point of writing the apps in the first place. There’s something these developers believe they can improve upon versus their competition.

Most all of these application start out with some basic list screen. You’ve got your teas, boom! This application by Decane is no different in that regard.

Tea Timer by Decane

What is different about their take on a Tea Timer application is their trend to keep it basic. There aren’t any extra widgets or tabs. You’ve got timers and you run them. It’s a wonderful example of practicing restraint from feature creep.

Tea Timer is also the only app I’ve reviewed so far which allows you to reorder your timers. It doesn’t do it for you by alphabetical listing and it doesn’t keep them in the order you create them. While I admit it’s not the most important feature in the world, I have found myself enjoying the freedom to arrange my list as I see fit. It comes in handy when running a more structure tasting session for example.

The beauty of this interface is how it falls in line with Apple’s own example with the Clock application. Not particularly novel, but instantly recognizable and simple for the user to figure out based on rudimentary experience with the iPhone and iPod Touch platform.

Editing the Timers

Creating a new timer is fairly standard. The on interesting option is that you can toggle whether a particular timer allows you to pause it. I’m not certain what circumstances would call for this feature, but it’s an interesting one to have.

I think inviting the user to enter a “name” for their timer instead of “the display text” would have been more user friendly. It’s a odd move considering the relative usability of the rest of the application.

Creating a New Timer

Selecting the alarm sound takes you to another screen where you select the sound from a list of options. Oddly, none of these options are existing ringtones you may have and instead are custom sounds provided with the application. So if I should want to have “Katie’s Tea” as my Tea Timer sound, I couldn’t do that.

Also, when selecting a timer sound, running through the list seems to have an issue where when playing one sound then selecting another has the first sound continue playing. This is somewhat irksome especially if the first sound happens to annoy me greatly. Selecting another sound should kill the first, before playing the second.

Running a timer is pretty straight forward. You have the name of the tea, the time left on the timer, a restart button if needed and a picture of a stopwatch in the background. The stopwatch is a bit out of place seeing as you’re running a timer, but the idea comes across properly and I doubt most users are as interface anal as I am.

Running a Timer

Overall I would say $2 ($1.99) is a bit much for such a basic application but Tea Timer by Decane is a good effort to create a tea timer program for the iPhone. I still don’t think it’s perfect. There are certainly a few issues to fix and I could see room for some additional but still basic features.

Pros

• Can create custom timers
• Can reorder timers
• Can select a custom sound for each timer

Cons

• When selecting a timer sound it continues to play even after you select another
• You can’t select an existing ringtone as a timer sound

Thursday is Teahouse/Tea Room, Accessory and Brand Review Day!

This application is the sibling application of “Tasting Notes”. But in the case of “Tea Tasting Notes” from App Shop, LLC… I’m seriously disappointed.

“Tea Tasting Notes” or “Tea Notes” as the icon labels itself on my iPhone, is an attempt to grow beyond the parent application reviewed last week here on Tea-Guy. This app however, only tackles tea. It expands on what the parent app has and tries to answer all of my issues from it’s parent. What we all hope for from our children.

I absolutely love the way this application attempts expands itself from a weak solution to something more robust, allowing you to select and expand the field listings and even add more star ratings into the mix.

Tea Tasting Notes

Press the edit button at the top and this application provides a very simple method to allowing you to expand on its existing options. You can easily expand using template designs, or create your own new fields. While you can’t unfortunately reorganize existing sections… you can at least add new sections with their own fields into the mix. Rather than rehashing last week’s review and again explaining why I feel the way I do about customizability… you could read it.

Editing the Sections

Diving into the editing capabilities of this app, I have to say, virtually all of my complaints were easily mastered. You can create your own fields and specify what kind of data the field should represent. You can even create more star rating objects, very handy for me when considering my differentiation is handling the review of flavor, aroma and boldness as separate scales.

Editing the overview options

Editing the ratings options

Editing the details options

“Well…” you ask… “What’s the problem then? Why do you dislike the application? Why did you give it a 1/5?”

Let me tell you… for all the bonuses this application gets for tacking most of my quibbles… for all it does to advance interface wise and to expand it’s customizability… it sucks because it’s buggier than a termite infestation!

But it's buggy

After creating the first review with this application… my main notes screen wigged out on me and appeared as the above. I tried exiting the app, it didn’t help. I tried reinstalling the app, that didn’t help either. I also tried adding more reviews to see if that’d kick it into gear. No go.

On top of that… the app crashes when trying to email a review to someone. And when taking photos for the reviews, the app reports that it cannot add the photo as it couldn’t save it. This while I had no issues with any other apps on my iPhone including Twitter apps, the iPhone camera app and even a silly mustache novelty application.

What’s most disappointing is that it comes so close to getting everything right… and then it let’s bugs in where everything matters.

Pros

• Can create custom fields for just about anything
• Can add extra star ratings fields
• Can record tea notes

Cons

• WOW is it bug-tastic!
• Extremely tap happy interface
• Can’t take photos any longer
• Can’t send emails any longer
• Parts of the interface are quirky (adding a new note, recording a web address into a note)

In fact, the three dollar ($2.99) app is so bad, it can’t even be found on the App Store any longer. How’s that for confidence? I hope the developer is working on improving the reliability of this application for re-posting. I can really see it being a 4/5 if it weren’t so bug friendly.

Help a good cause: CharityWater.org

Monday is Teahouse/Tea Room, Accessory and Brand Review Day!

Ahhh, software. Always the promise of making our lives easier, and always the worry that it won’t. In the case of “Tasting Notes” from App Shop, LLC… I’m mixed.

The first thing you’ll notice about “Tasting Notes” when you launch it is that it offers options for notes on just about any vice you could think of: wine, beer, whisky, cigars, coffee and yes… tea. While this is certainly promising, it always makes me worry when I see an application trying to cover so much ground. It just never seems like it’s going to be focused enough. Does “Tasting Notes” fall down the dirty pit of mediocrity? Let’s find out!

Tasting Notes

Once you make your way into the tea notes section you’ll find an initially very sparse list. This is to be expected since we haven’t taken any notes yet. However, my first instinct wasn’t to click on the green {+} button next to the empty entry… it was to tap the blue {>} arrow next to the field. It would have been nice if the field were able to activate the new note functionality itself. If no entries are present, it may have been even better to just include a big button which says “Start your first entry” or something like that.

Creating a new tea note

When creating a new note, the application seems to offer plenty of options. Good room for a long tea name, the option for noting the tea’s type, taking a picture of the tea, lining to the website, rating the tea and a bunch more. Unfortunately, the application falls short here. There are a few notable reasons why.

First off, when selecting the type of tea, you’re limited to a single type of tea. Not much room for a Green/Black blend, but it was encouraging to see Pu’erh and Rooibos in the list. Second, the rating option provides only a single slider bar for rating teas. Three sliders should be the minimum here allowing you to rate the tea’s flavor, aroma and boldness (or body) independent of one another.

Also, I want to make particular light of the fact that any field requiring text input doesn’t automatically take focus. This means you have to tap inside the field to begin editing text. Considering you have to tap the item to indicate which field you want to alter anyway… this is an extra tap. If this were with just one field, I could envision it being a bug. But it’s not. It’s with every field. That means, assuming you never had to go back into a field to correct part of your entry… and you filled out every field requiring text input… that’s an extra eight taps which are completely unnecessary.

There’s also no room to note origin, varietal, source or brand name with the given fields in this application. To be fair there is a “Notes” area here… but that’s not quite the same. I just felt very limited here.

The tea note

It was nice having the ability to take a picture of the tea itself. While I could rely on a photo to provide me the brand name of the tea, perhaps I would have taken a photo of the liquor instead. You could also put the brand name in the “Name” field for the tea, but it doesn’t feel the same.

Using the camera

Emailing the notes on the teas seems interesting if you were wanting to share your ratings with friends or family. I really could make use of this feature, and I like its simplicity. It’s a shame it has to drop you out of the application in order to provide this feature. Perhaps this is Apple’s doing, I’m not certain. The icon for this feature doesn’t scream “Email” either. It’s hidden in the upper right hand corner of the screen as a square box with a pencil looking thing in it. I easily could have mistaken it for an icon intended for creating a new note.

Emailing the tea note

Once you have created a complete tea note, and drop out of it, you’re presented with a new version of the “Tea Notes” screen. This time, there’s no initial indication of how to add a new note at all. Only once you’ve hit the “Edit” button at the top right are you offered the chance to enter yet more notes. Considering the earlier noted tap requirements for fields requiring text input… this makes the Tasting Notes application extremely tap happy.

Tap Happy Interface

It may seem harsh, but I’m slapping “Tasting Notes” by App Shop, LLC with a rounded 2 out of 5 for the tea portion of this application. I think it has limited appeal for enthusiastic tea drinkers and the application’s tap happy interface is a real drawback. While I think the application is trying to do something noteworthy… as so many who try to much often do… this app falls short in a lot of rudimentary areas. Here’s a nice list for you:

Pros

• Can take pictures
• Can email entries
• Can record tea notes

Cons

• Extremely tap happy interface
• Cannot note brand name as a field
• Cannot record separate ratings for different aspects of the tea
• Emailing the entry takes you out of the application
• Cannot email more than one entry at a time
• Nation of origin is not a field option
• Cannot select more than one “type”
• Parts of the interface are quirky (adding a new note, recording a web address into a note)
• Cannot record the varietal
• Cannot record the sub-class of tea (ok it’s black, but what kind? Assam? Darjeeling? Ceylon? Flavored?)

For a five dollar application ($4.99), Tasting Notes really lacks a lot of the pizazz and flair I’ve come to expect from software for the iPhone and iPod Touch in this price range. I hope they can up their game a bit and correct some of these deficiencies. I would really appreciate an application flexible enough to handle the rigors of rating teas online. The antiquated pencil and paper method is getting tiring now and I have several moleskines of notes I would LOVE to transfer into digital format.

Help a good cause: CharityWater.org

It is for this purpose that beginning in August, accessory and product reviews will be swapping with news, culture and history.

You can thus expect to see the following items reviewed on Thursdays moving forward:

• Books
• Software
• Infusers
• Kettles
• Water Warmers
• Cozies
• Tea Houses/Tea Rooms
• Tea Storage containers

Moving forward you can expect the following to appear on Mondays

• News
• Culture
• History
• Event coverage
• Announcements
• Updates
• New feature introductions
• Interviews with tea industry experts and entrepreneurs.

I believe this new schedule will jive better with you as my audience and certainly hope it will help drive traffic in a more predicatable manner.

Help a good cause: CharityWater.org

The questions I have been asking myself for the past six months are:

• Is advertising inherently evil?
• Does it constitute a waste of visual space?
• Does it distract from my content?

After quite a lot of thought on these and other worries I have finally decided that some visual advertising may actually be helpful for this site. My primary mission is to expose visitors such as yourself to more tea and tea flavors and brands than they may have had access to before.

The visual space usage doesn’t have to be all that great to help expose you to new teas, and hopefully… help offset some of the costs of running this site.

You will find adverts on the following page types:

• Tea Reviews
• News, Culture & History posts
• Accessory, Books and Software Reviews

You will NOT see advertisements on these page types:

• Static pages (such as the Tea Info pages)
• Brand Pages
• Feature Announcements

As I move forward with integrating the advertisements I’d like to make this process as transparent as possible. To ensure I’m not taking large kickbacks, you should know I have chosen to use an affiliate link service called LinkShare.

Different advertisers contribute in different ways, and I only apply for affiliate participation with companies or services which have something to offer the modern tea drinker.

So far these are affiliates I have signed up with:

• Adagio Teas, purveyors of some mighty fine teas. Some of which I have already reviewed.
  
• Amanzi Tea, a tea company I have yet to review.
  
• Alessi, an accessory maker with some neat contemporary products.
  
• Tea Forte’, another tea company with unique packaging whom I have yet to review.
  

I hope this level of transparency will help make the ensuing advertising more palatable. You won’t see the adverts everywhere and they won’t be like paint splatter on the pages where they do exist. They’ll only be for companies which have something topical to offer you. All proceeds will go to keeping this site going as costs continue to rise with increased traffic and posts while introducing new features!

Thanks for understanding this need. I’m excited to see how this goes and if enough funding offset begins coming through these affiliates, you could see more in-depth writings showing up as I can fund some extra research time!

Help a good cause: CharityWater.org