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Comments on main Recipe screen

ChrisNH

Brewer
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Oct 13, 2010
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Hi,

I thought I would provide some kudos and critique on the new recipe screen. Overall I like it a lot. I think the combination of the presentation of controls for the ingredients with the visual display of the key parameters (OG, etc) to be fantastic.

First, kudos..

1. I really like graphs of parameters vs style. When I read about it I thought it was going to be eye candy but it has proven to be very helpful. Nice job on that!

2. Likewise, the beer glass image is also more helpful then I expected. It has a bit of a green tint to it on all computers I use it on, but not enough to take away from the usefulness.

3. The screen is less cluttered which is a good thing.

4. The percentage tool for grain has been useful. I have used it in a few cases and I really liked it. Thanks!!

Complaints:

1. I am not fond of how the "select your fields" column displays. It used to be that we had useful info organized near where it needed to be. For instance, we had the total grain weight and total hops under the ingredients. Bitterness Ratio and the various gravities were organized together. While I applaud the flexibility of the selectable fields, it ends up being a column of stuff that can be hard to find and use.   SUGGESTION: At the least, provide the ability to create dividers. Add Hops, Grain, and Cost back under the inventory.

2. Inherited from 1.4, the hops can be a bit of a jumble of info that can be hard to read as things are of different length. SUGGESTION: Add a column that can contain either the time (Hops) or the SRM (Grain). I think it will make the ingredient list much more readable. A different icon for leaf hops and pellet hops would be kind of nice too.

3. I really miss being able to "save as". Having to copy the recipe then go to the copy and change the name is a bit kludgy. If I go down a path where I want to save what I did but not lose my original I am kind of stuck. I have had a number of cases where I have lost updates or had unwanted updates saved. I find the process confusing.
fixed in 038

Request:

1. Is it possible to make the ingredient screen sizeable? Change Font/spacing so its more open if we so desire?

2. Can we copy and paste ingredients on the inventory? Once I have set up an ounce of cascade for leaf and AA then I would like to make a copy for each addition and only have to change the time.

Over-all, great work. I am enjoying the program.

Thanks,

Chris

 
I have had another recipe build and brew day (Belgian Pale Ale). I just wanted to comment on one other thing on the "recipe design" screen.

While I don't want to draw too much comparison to a web-based app, I find the screen on Hopville where I have grains, hops, yeast, and everything else separated into different sections very appealing. I think Beersmith could take a cue from this and do more to divide up the ingredient groups on this screen.

As a temp fix, being able to sort by multiple columns would help. For instance, Type then #.  Perhaps a default custom sort could be added to the options in lieu of adding more controls on the design screen. I did notice that "custom columns" was a grayed out option so perhaps more is on the way.

Thanks,

Chris

 
Thanks for the feedback - I will continue to refine this as we go to make it better.

I'm already looking at ways to be able to adjust the ingredients box size, and also thinking of moving the tabs up onto the title bar to give you more room to work.  I like the idea of adding separators for the select-fields - I'll see if I can work on that for a future update.

Brad
 
I too am liking the new Beersmith, but one thing that is bugging me is that the main buttons to swap pages in a recipe (Recipe design, yeast starter, mash details, fermentation, water volume and notes) disappear when you scroll down the page. I have found that I am wanting to flick between the pages a bit and I have to scroll back up to the top to do so. i.e. if I am entering notes on the notes screen it automatically scrolls down and hides the buttons. I there already some quick way to flick between the pages, and if not is it possible to fix these buttons at the top of the screen so they are always present??
 
oh, and the scroll wheel does not scroll down within each page, which is kind of frustrating when you are used to using it.
 
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