Beer Diary version 1.3 released
Version 1.3 of my BeerDiary app is now live on the iOS AppStore! You can download it here.
I would love to receive your feedback. If you have questions or remarks don’t hesitate to send me a message.
New features
Import improvements
This version greatly improves the Import process, making it more resilient and easier to use.
When starting the Import process, there is now a link to a page with detailed information about the input requirements:
Please refer to this page for more detailed information. I will keep on updating that page as the feature progresses.
When the Import process has finished there is now also a better summary:
Home Screen shortcut
This version added a Home Screen shortcut for easy access. Just long press the Beer Diary icon on your home screen and use the ‘Add New’ option:
Implementation notes
Feel free to skip this section if you’re not that technical 😁
String catalog
For this version I switched to Xcode 15 string catalogs. This is a very nice improvement over the old .strings format. Xcode automatically scans your project for usable strings and presents them in a single view. It’s also easy to notice if translations are missing. I would love to have a build warning for this though, maybe that will come in the future. Information about this feature from Apple can be found here
Import
Improvements in this area were mostly motivated by me trying to use the feature for my own collection. There were some overly-strict checks in place (for file extensions for instance) that I needed to remove. Now any file format that can be loaded into UIImage is allowed. As of now these are the supported formats:
- GIF
- JPG
- HEIF
- PNG
- TIF
Also, I added some code to deduct the dateAdded field from the file timestamp of the first Photo (if present). This will save a lot of time for sure.
Crash reporting
The built in crash reporting from Apple is, in my opinion, a bit basic. So I tried to add Firebase Crashlytics but that dragged in a lot of dependencies. And also, I’m not sure I want to upload all this data to Google (who own Firebase). So I ended up with Sentry as an alternative. It’s relatively light and I have configured it to send as little information as possible. It’s also possible to run your own server but that seemed one step too far for now. It was quite easy to set up with the included wizard tool but it needed some slight tweaking to properly upload the Debug Information files.
The privacy statement and Privacy Report on the App Store has been updated to reflect this change.
Other
For my own comfort I added a separate DEV app variant so I can experiment without compromising my actual data. To add a small banner to the app icon I ended up using this tool. I also tweaked the tint a bit to make it stand out even more. This is the result:
