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Low Hanging Fruit: Make input fields bigger!

agusus

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I think this would be an easy to implement improvement to BeerSmith, but also high value considering how easy it would be to change - make the input fields, especially the Notes field on recipes, bigger.
Right now it looks like BeerSmith was designed in 1999 for an 800x600 resolution monitor. ;)  On my 1600x1200 monitor, the screen real estate used by BeerSmith in the recipe view is only about 60% of the screen. The Notes and Taste input boxes only fit 2 to 4 lines of text (2 for Taste, 4 for Notes) before you have to scroll. This is annoying because I often write 10+ lines of text in Notes, and sometimes 4+ in Taste. Makes it hard to review recipes quickly. The Preview view of recipes doesn't solve this problem because I often need to be able to review my notes when I'm in the recipe view tweaking recipe parameters and stuff.

Seems like increasing these field sizes would just be a tweak of a few constants in a resource file, and BeerSmith could be modernized into the 21st century :)  My monitor is actually 5 years old, so it's not even that large anymore. New monitors today are often at 1920x1200 or larger. If you do decide to make them bigger, let me know! Thanks for a great beer program. The fact that this is the only nit-pick I have about it is a testament to its usefulness.
 
I'm in the process of doing this now with the new version.  I'm basically doing a complete rewrite of the program to allow for unlimited text in most fields as well as a significantly updated user interface.

Cheers,
Brad
 
Super, thanks!

Also I just noticed a bug with the Taste input field - it truncates the input to 252 characters.  It allows you to type in more, but then when you save the recipe and go back to it later you've lost all your text beyond 252 characters. :(  I've lost some of my tasting notes because of this.  Hope you're including a fix for this as well.
 
Any update on how the new version is progressing and when you expect it to be available?
 
The new version is going well but it is not done.  I have about 90% of the tools complete, the basic databases and recipe entering and manipulation tools done.  I'm working on detailed statistics and mashing profiles next.  The largest blocks still left include the calendar, various file formats, and a lot of cleanup work such as keyboard shortcuts, options dialogs, cleaning up the look and feel, etc...not to mention all of the help documentation.  I also have all of the code running on Mac and PC as I'm developing in parallel.

I'm hoping to have something ready next Spring (sorry) but we will see.  If I can make a big push on the Christmas break I may at least have an alpha version for some of the early test team to cut their teeth on early next year.

It has been a long road and I know many are waiting for it.  I'm working to try to make it worth the wait.

Thanks,
Brad
 
Any update on this?  The text input field clipping is a super big problem - I've been losing some of my brewing and tasting notes because BeerSmith clips them off at 256/512 characters (or so) and doesn't warn before clipping.  This is a super big deal!  It's data loss on my recipes and long-term notes. I'm considering switching to an alternate method of recording my recipes.

From reading your other posts it sounds like the fix you're working on is not actually an incremental release (v1.5) but is actually a 2.0 and will cost money.  That's not exactly what I was expecting. I think you should do a bug fix release for 1.4. Even if it only fixed the data loss bug, that would be worth the work.
If you can't do a bug fix release, could you maybe send me a copy of the source code (which I promise to keep private - I'll even sign a contract) and I'll fix the bug myself and recompile a binary for my machine only (also not distributed)?
 
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