literally ran out of room in the other post, so here we go. I've made massive changes to the app today and honestly it warrants another post. Mods feel free to delete if you disagree.
old screenshot: http://i.imgur.com/He9K2vu.png
new screenshot: http://imgur.com/F7Ie0pw
Build: 05.22.2016 6:11pm EST
Added Features/Changes:
- Added search bar functionality - ingredient library can now be searched to find the ingredient that you're looking for.
- Recipe list UI portion has been adjusted and now organizes your recipes by category (with icons!)
- Application has a sweet icon now!
- fixed bug with recipe editor where changes weren't saved unless you actually moved away from a field.
- Added tooltips for all relevant components, hovering over an item that is too big for the list will now show it in a tooltip to avoid scrolling.
- Added recipe name to the main mixLab UI.
These are pretty massive quality of life features that have been added. For those who are using the app, please shoot some feedback my way and let me know what you think of the changes. Next up on the todo list:
- MaxVG functionality
- Potential color coding for ingredient types. Still debating how this is going to play out. i'm considering just tagging each ingredient type with an icon in the mix lab view and organizing the mix lab by type.
- menu options for saving your libraries, right now you still have to close the window to trigger the data to save.
**UPDATE 05.22.2016 **
new UI! Got rid of the recipe ingredients on the left. MixLab on the bottom now contains the recipe ingredients that you're working with. Added a bunch of cool icons and such and changed the view up quite a bit. Max VG works now as well! Yay!
Icons exist for the following categories:
- Fruits
- Menthols
- Desserts
I'll add more down the road or make it more configurable.
Love the concept, there are way more functionalities than those online calculator but it's still a bit buggy (resizing window, access parameters). Keep up the good work. Also as you choose to let the user add his flavoring maybe in the future it could be awesome to keep track of the stock to know in a glimpse how much ml of x flavor we have.
Really digging the collapsible folder structure of recipes on the left-pane. Nice job. And the search bar makes finding specific ingredients super-fast! The ajax-style "live search" is very handy.
Just a few notes, for the first 10-minutes of myself poking through the latest version:
- It seems that, when I make a new Category on the left-pane recipe list, it does not persist in the drop-down when I make another new recipe. Could be a bug?
- Is there a reason for there being two "Ingredient" lists? It sort of feels a bit redundant to have the Ingredient list on the upper-left, as well as the main pane on the bottom. If there is no big reason for the upper-left one, I'd suggest to only have the recipe ingredients viewed on the bottom pane.
- Speaking of Ingredients list: I also think it is a bit redundant to include PG and VG in the upper-left pane. It should only be shown in the final "Mix" list at the bottom pane. Of course, this note is invalid if the upper-left pane is done-away with.
- It seems that the Manufacturer pulldown on an ingredient's properties panel also does not list all of the manufacturers you have entered. Bug? Or maybe I'm expecting something you did not design?
- "Mix" list (I'm calling the bottom pane "Mix List"): it appears to show a quasi-alphabetical order right now (VG and PG seem to not coincide with alphabetical sorting). This is a suggestion, as it is part of my personal workflow, but could we have Nicotine be listed AFTER the flavor ingredients? The reason I do this is because I don't add nic until the "middle" portion of the mix, as I want the nicotine solution to rest on a "bed" of fluid (the concentrates). I also do not add nic to the very end of a mix, as it will rest on the very top of the solute. Basically, my mixing order is: Concentrates > Nicotine base > VG > PG. The nic is in the middle so that it dissolves within the solute as evenly as possible. Could we have this listed in the above order? Or have an option to do so?
- Could we have the name of the mix in a larger font? Or, if the upper-left pane is removed, have in large type the name of the mix, the nicotine strength selected, the PG/VG Ratio, and the final mix volume total? For example:
Banana Milk, 3mg, 30/70, 28ml
This would make it easy to confirm all of the essential technical details before starting a mix. There have been times when I've mixed for friends who wanted different nic strength and different PG/VG ratios, but I forgot to confirm these details and messed up.
Sorry for the long-winded notes -- I am just excited that you are putting so much time into this and that your app is really coming together. Thanks again for creating this for the Mac users of this hobby.
EDIT: forgot to also request a Backup and Restore function for flavor database and recipes!
- Categories showing in drop down just hasn't been implemented yet. Gonna work on some things this morning until the gf gets out of bed and drags me away to something and that is one of them, along with categories for ingredients in the ingredient library.
- The more that I think about it, the more correct you are. The app's UI has been rehauled a few times and the original data model sorta 'needed' that tableview to work properly. With the data model being the way that it is now, it really isn't as necessary. I'll look into this, because I like the idea of pulling it out altogether and moving the ingredient library to the lefthand side, and using the righthand side for an information panel of some sort.
- Manufacturer for ingredients not showing in the pulldown just hasn't been implemented yet. It's on the todo and will probably be done over the weekend.
- MIXLAB!!!! it's the MIXLAB!!! lol, i dunno why, I love the mix lab. Ok so here's the cool part. I don't expect this is fully working yet because I don't think that I've added the array sort into the mixLab yet (oops) BUT when you setup a recipe, if you put a sequence into your ingredients (if you edit a recipe ingredient on the left you'll see sequence numbers), it will order the recipe by sequence. So if you want to mix your nicotine prior to mixing your PG/VG, just set the sequence number to be a lower sequence number than your PG/VG.
- Absolutely, it's on my shortlist of to-do's today as well. When I was looking at it yesterday after I'd finished up I had pretty much the same thoughts as you.
- Let me see what I can come up with as far as redesigning the main panel today, I have an idea that may make things look pretty sweet, and god knows I love rewriting all of my fucking code
- Importing and exporting libraries will definitely be in my next release. tbh it's sorta boring/easy code lol so I haven't been excited to do it and it's gotten back burnered, but I know it's important functionality so I'll work on that over the weekend.
and don't apologize for the longwinded notes lol, I'm glad to have feedback.
Another feature request: Reminders/alerts when a bottle's "steeping" is complete. Right now, if I remember to, I put a reminder in my Google Calendar to notify me when one of my test bottles is done aging. It would be great to have something like this implemented into the Mix Lab app. If you're feeling fancy, maybe even have a graphical clock to show elapsed time/time left before steeping is ready? I guess something like this could be a separate module in itself, with the ability to select the recipe which has been bottled, and the date and time which the "Curing complete!" alert is sent out. Email notification, too? Or, since it's written in Swift, tie in the alert function to an iOS app? Haha dare to dream and all that.
Could you compile a version for Yosemite (10.10)?
Notes for Build: 05.22.2016 6:11pm EST
Looking and feeling a lot more streamlined now. Nice one! Also, the fixes for the Ingredient Type and Recipe Category dropdowns are welcome. Here are a few things I've noticed during the first little bit of myself testing this build:
- When creating a new recipe and clicking the "Save" button to start populating it with ingredients, the focus should immediately go to the new recipe. However, focus seems to go to the last clicked-on recipe.
- the PG/VG (and Max VG) ratios don't seem to refresh properly when clicking through recipes with differing ratios
- perhaps having Nicotine Base being considered different than an ingredient is needed, as people have varying strengths of nic base. Flavor ingredients can be considered to be "100% flavor", but nicotine base can be widely varying ratios of nicotine. It would be good to have the calculator know the base's strength, then adjust the volume/weight of nic base for the user to add to the mix. Right now, it looks like your CXT Nicotine (PG) in the 'Nana Cream Clone recipe is being considered an ingredient. But what if the nicotine concentration in the base is, say 48mg/ml and I want the end mix's strength to be just 2.5mg/ml? Do I need to do the math myself and enter the ratio manually? Would be good (and probably safer) to have MixLab do this automatically. "Strength" in the ingredient properties box is probably used just for nicotine... maybe we could have a different area for our nicotine bases? Have I been considering the nicotine input workflow incorrectly?
- When checking the Max VG option to on, could we have the VG/PG ratio input fields grayed-out? It would make it more apparent that Max VG has been set.
- Maybe move the "Total Flavor Percentage" to the Recipe list? It just feels like there is a "TOTALS" already in the recipe list, so maybe have the Flavor Totals there, too, would make sense...
- Is there a way to edit or delete Recipe Categories or Flavor Types?
- Are there Undo's?
Nice work, afflaq! Thanks for implementing those big changes, especially the removal of the prior upper-left ingredient pane.
EDIT:
- it seems that the Manufacturer drop down in Ingredients Library is still not being populated properly
just a few thoughts..still got a lot of work to do, but it's coming along nicely. I keep telling myself it isn't bad for learning the language that it's written in a week and a half ago.
- Focus issues will be sorted out over time, I don't expect them to all work 100% yet. Getting there though. Keep pointing these out to me, my workflow isn't the same as everyone so it's good to see.
- Will take a look
- It's considered differently but apparently not working the way that it should. i'll have to take a look at this. The idea is that you put the strength in mg of your nicotine in that field and it adjusts properly. i.e.: my nic is 100mg so it should adjust for that. It doesn't seem to be doing so, so i'll be taking a look at that asap tomorrow (Game of thrones is soon and pizza's on the way, and i've already started my bourbon consumption for the evening)
- The vg/pg fields were greying out earlier, this is definitely a bug as they should be disabled when the checkbox is checked.
- Flavor % could be potentially moved, we'll see. I'm sorta personally a fan of it there but logistically it may make more sense that way.
- so the flavor type hasn't been finished yet, just recipe categories for now -- but yes, you can edit a recipe category by simply changing the category name in the recipe itself. Changing an entire category isn't something that's been implemented at this point as the categories are generated dynamically based on the Category field from the recipes themselves. Ie: you could type a different category for each recipe and it'd auto generate the categories based on that.
- no un-do's yet, it's on the longer term list. Right now the way out is to just force close the app without closing the window so it doesn't write the xml, so it's a little wonky.
Big things:
- Crash if you hit the leftmost button of the flavors table after first launch, probably looking for object at index nil on your [flavors] before any row has been selected.
- Cancel button on popover doesn't cancel adding the liquid to the table (you can see it when the table refreshes), and cancel button on popover for editing a liquid doesn't cancel the changes that have been made.
- Need to use the nicotine strength when calculating percent from target strength. You have a field for strength, but it doesn't change the recipe.
Thanks for the catches -- working on these now. The nic strength I caught last night and the others are catches that I need to fix.
This is awesome! I just saw the new version and am already playing around with it. It will take me forever to input all my recipes in here, but I'll definitely get around to it.
Thanks for making this.
By the way, will it be possible to export the current library of recipes I make to new versions of the program that you introduce? Assuming you keep making improvements to it.
It definitely will be an easy menu item long term, in the short term there's a way to do it as well as i've not modified the schema I don't think in any breaking way. i'll be releasing a new version soon actually, probably thursday, and i'll try to get the import function in so that you can import your recipes that way.
Still working to make it better, just been quiet as i've been busy with real work and working on this instead of running my mouth on reddit ;)
Really liked that last release, still has some bugs of course. Do you have any updates?
I will soon. I've been super busy trying to get my flavor profiles squared away for my juice line release prior to deadlines, so I've been focusing a bit more on mixing and some other development recently. I'm planning a release by the end of the month that should have most of the bugs squashed and such. I'm juggling about 40 hats right now and trying to focus on the ones that have finite deadlines right now, but it isn't an abandoned project. I'm planning on launching my juice line by the end of this month, then I may have a bit more time to work on the Mac app. Sorry for the delay, I love you!
Good luck with the juice line. You have a great project going in Alchemy.. I know time is a limited supply item... Looking forward to the next release!
If it is something you don't have time to develop anymore, I'm sure that are eager minds that could continue to code for you.
:)