• Welcome to the new forum! We upgraded our forum software with a host of new boards, capabilities and features. It is also more secure.
    Jump in and join the conversation! You can learn more about the upgrade and new features here.

Seeing several issues with BeerSmith 2

SCWells72

Apprentice
Joined
Nov 14, 2010
Messages
20
Reaction score
0
Upgraded my Windows 7 and Mac OS X machines today (the latter really being a new install because I was using Wine there to run the Windows version).  I'm seeing a few issues.  I know the request was for one thread per bug logged, but I figured I'd throw these out there and can split them off into individual threads if that makes sense.

I installed BeerSmith2 to Windows 7 first to eliminate any issues around picking up a Wine-hosted version.  That went fine, and it prompted me to import my 1.4 recipes immediately, which it did.  In general things look good, but there are a few things I've noticed:

None of the reports list my ingredients properly.  This is true on both Windows 7 and Mac OS X (both BeerSmith 2 native to the respective platforms).  Each report lists "Ingredients" then there's nothing below that until the next section.  When I open the actual recipe I see all the ingredients listed properly, though.  Not sure what's going on there, but it means I can't print out useful brew steps.

Mac OS X performance is very sluggish relative to Windows performance.  My Mac is pretty beefy and generally nothing else runs slow.  I have 4GB of RAM.  Nonetheless, the Mac version is very slow...not quite unusably slow, but close to it.  Any idea why?  Perhaps wxWidgets on the Mac is just slow?

It doesn't seem to remember some of my settings.  For example, if I set up recipe sorting in a folder to be by date descending (which I typically do), then exit the program, then restart it, the setting seems to be lost.  This is true on both the Mac and Windows, so I doubt it's a filesystem permissions issue.

I think those are the main usability issues I'm hitting.  I also noticed that the starter calculation seem to be either for stir plates or (what JZ calls) simple starters.  I actually use intermittent shaking with my starters which isn't as efficient as a stir plate, but is significantly more effective than a simple starter.  Any way to model the behavior of intermittent shaking in this calculator?  Also, any way to have it measure just the starter volume in metric (liters) instead of standard (quarts)?  I use standard measurements for most of my volume values, but since starters with proper gravity can be calculated easily using the 100 grams of DME per liter of starter (pre-boil), I use metric for my starters.  I know I can type the value in as, e.g., 1.3 l, and it'll convert to quarts, but it doesn't get reported that way in the recipe so I still have to jot down the starter size on the side...

Anyway, in spite of these small issues that I know will be resolved quickly, I wanted to thank Brad for offering such amazing software to us at such an awesome price point!!!  Keep up the great work!
 
Hi,
- Could you send me a recipe or two (in BeerSmith 2 format) via email to beersmith at my beersmith.com address that display the ingredient problem - I've been unable to recreate that here so I'm very interested in seeing it.

- I'm not sure why your Mac version is running slower.  For some strange reason here, my PC version actually runs slower than my Mac copy even though my PC is a top-of-the line I7.  My Mac is pretty snappy.  Which OSX are you running?

- The "loss of memory" on field sorted is an issue - and I have it high on my list to correct.

- Regarding "shaking" I might suggest that you check the stir plate box and then go into the yeast settings on the option dialog and adjust the "stir plate factor" down to a reasonable number that might model your shaking.  Its currently 3.0 but I would imaging shaking is not quite as good.

- You are the second person to ask for a separate unit setting for starters - not too difficult to do, but lots of little places would need to be changed.  I'll add it to the list.

Thanks for the kind comments as well...

Brad
 
Sure, I'll send a few recipes exported from Beersmith2 in just a few.  Hopefully that'll help you diagnose what I'm seeing.  I'm using a Mac MINI with the latest version of Snow Leopard, so it's completely up-to-date.  CPU is 1.83GHz Core 2 Duo and as I mentioned before, I have 4GB of 667MHz DDR2 SDRAM.  Everything else runs silky smooth on here, but Beersmith2 is very sluggish right now.  I have the latest version of Xcode 4 installed so perhaps I could get some profiling snapshots to send you?

I'll take a look at the stir plate settings and see if I can change them to match the results of JZ's yeast pitching calculator with intermittent shaking selected.  If so, I'll be happy to post the results back to you in case you want to have pre-canned profiles.

Recipes en route shortly...

UPDATE: I verified that I'm able to use Instruments to profile the BeerSmith2 process.  Let me know if you'd like for me to do so, and specifically what type of profiling information you'd like for me to collect.
 
Thanks for the recipes - I'm going to run the debugger on it today.

Brad
 
It's worth mentioning that the reports-without-ingredients problem is happening with a brand new recipe as well, so it doesn't seem to be an issue with stuff imported from BeerSmith 1.4...it's seems to be an issue with BeerSmith2 (at least on my machines).
 
Hi guys, my first post here.

I've the same issue on Mac. I was running BeerSmith 1 using Wine and it's still faster than native Mac BS 2.0.40.

I'm on a first generation MacBook. Core Duo 2GHz, 2GB of RAM. Mac OS 10.6.2


Thanks in advance.
 
Yeah, 2.0.40 seems better than previous builds, but it's still VERY sluggish relative to the Windows install or, as the previous poster stated, even 1.4 running under Wine in OS X.

I've also seen some visual artifacts with the latest build, e.g., if I switch from Recipe Design to Yeast Starter and back on an open recipe, the Date selector ends up with part of the yeast grid painted on its background until I "touch" that component (i.e., click the drop-down to select a date).  This only happens on OS X, not on Windows.  I'm not at home now so I can't take a screenshot, but I could this evening if that helps.

I'm wondering if the cross-platform component library might not be the root cause of some of these performance issues.  I did a tiny bit of CPU profiling with Instruments and noticed that some of the main symbols bubbling to the top of the CPU usage list seemed to be UI-oriented, though I couldn't tell at a glance whether they were from the wxWidgets library.  Brad, as I've mentioned before, I'm happy to run through some well-defined click paths with CPU profiling enabled and provide you the snapshots for analysis.
 
Hi,
 If you have some profiling information, please send it along to my email or via PM.  I know the cross platform library is far from perfect (I had some growing pains during beta testing) and it does slow things down a bit even on the windows side, but it was really the best I could find for doing this type of thing across windows and mac without developing two programs.

  The "date field" artifacts appear to be wxWidgets related - though I have not had time to dive into their code and figure out why it is not repainting properly.

Brad
 
Just emailed CPU sampling logs for several key operations that are sluggish for me on OS X but not (as much, at least) on Windows.  Please let me know what else you need to help debug this...
 
Has there been a solution to this yet? My reports are all showing nothing under ingredients also.
 
My only solution was to completely uninstall (including the user directory contents) and reinstall, ensuring I'm not using a directory that is used by any other instance of BeerSmith 2.0, in particular via something like DropBox.  Since then I've had no further issues.
 
Back
Top