Hehe - Never meant to start a holy war, but since we're on the subject: not only does Taplist.io compare with Rpints, but it
also "competes" with my
other project, Kegbot. Which has been around almost as long as HBT itself!
So I expressly took some of the lessons and problems I've seen with both Kegbot and Rpints and designed Taplist.io around them: simplicity over openness, to be sure. I know day_trippr and others pour a bunch of blood sweat and tears into Rpints, but they really do serve very different interests, so its sort of an apples and oranges comparison, imo. (I'm certainly very grateful for the kind words & validation, tho!)
The first thing my brewing sidekick pointed out was that it was lacking the ability to select a specific color for the beer. She made a beer with blackberry that came out neon purple and that option was not available in pints. That seemed to be the breaking point for her.
Funny you should mention, I spent probably an inordinate amount of time on getting this feature "right" in taplist.io. Here's how: I have no artistic talent, so I found someone who does, on elance, and paid a few hundred bucks to get nice layered keg illustrations drawn. Then I wrote some support for changing the middle layer - the keg "fluid" - to an arbitrary color, and finally wrote an endpoint to merge & serve the whole image up as a nice single transparent PNG.
If you customize the keg srm, it'll use the equivalent color in hex (
thanks homebrewtalk), you can also override it to anything you want, sometimes with
funny results..
Any chance you're going to add support for volume tracking / display? Even something as simple as a "button" to push to manually track dispensing would be great.
Yeah! To be honest the only reason it isn't exposed is because I'd porbably start going crazy with hardware & flow meter support
. Under the hood, each keg you tap has the concept of a volume, there's just no public api to change it right now. That just came up recently
in a discussion on the topic. Long story short, expect this to be opened up soon, I'd love to see what folks do with it!
I would be happy to see a "premium" tier of some sort so that the dev could get some ROI on his investment. Maybe include some custom branding and removal of Taplist branding. I could definitely see this as useful for commercial tap rooms.
Thank you! I've loved the inventiveness of the hbt'ers and other non-commercial users using it so far, so been a little reluctant to hold my hat out. Some examples of customized lists:
1,
2 - sorry to put anyone on the spot! But yes, costs - while low - are nonzero, and I'd love to find a sweet spot where some better commercial features could support and subsidize "the basics" for home users, keeping the core product "free forever" in the spirit of great products like github. More on this in the coming months I think.
Being able to control individual displays from the same backend with very minimal hardware (just a rpi or firetv) per display. Pretty awesome.
Yes! I know I'm a broken record here on this subject, but the firetv is really a delight for this kind of application. As a developer, it's a really great "stock" android platform in almost all regards. And for signage apps like this, it can be truly "set it and forget it". I'm a big believer!
Thanks for all the feedback! cheers,
mikey