Show HN: Picky Pint – Scan beer lists with a photo

Bravo! The site is beautiful and unusually complete. You've put in a lot of thought and work, and it shows. The press release for today was a nice touch. It's great to see the choice of iOS and Android as well as free and paid versions. I have no idea how many "beer ratings" apps are out there with a menu snapshot feature, but it's a wonderful idea.

Suggestion #1: Describe what we get for the paid "Pro" version. At present, your site only says there's a "Free" version and a "Pro" version, but does not differentiate between the two.

(Note To Self: Do I really want the "Professional" version of a drinking app on my phone? -- Hmmm.... Decisions, Decisions, ;-)

Suggestion #2: Give a bit more information about the ratings and reviews, like where they come from.

Suggestion #3: I know there's a craft brewers association of some sort in the US (I saw it in a documentary I watched a while ago). It might be a useful source of data, particularly for the more esoteric, seasonal, and limited run, brews. I think the following is the group site:

http://www.brewersassociation.org/

Good Luck!

I'd love to see ABV on the main list (instead of having to go to that beer's individual page). When I'm scanning through a menu, that's one of the primary things I look at.

Pretty cool idea. I don't have a beer menu here to test with, but the search is very fast.

One critique: your website doesn't explain the difference between Free and Pro. I had to go to the App Store to find that info, which took a lot longer.

One suggestion: add other dimensions for sorting besides bitterness. There are a lot of things other than bitterness that distinguish different styles.

One feature request: Let me track my own ratings and view them later. This is the first beer app that feels fast enough to use for tracking my own beer ratings. I love tracking books I've read in Goodreads because it makes it easy to find them again. I want to do the same thing for beer, but the apps I've tried (Pintly and BeerAdvocate) have been painfully slow and hard to use.

Great, now bars will start implementing MITM attacks on their wifi routers to steer you to yesterday's flat keg.

You've got to be kidding me - 5 days ago I was looking at a long beer list from random brewers at Porter Ale House in Austin and thought of this exact same idea. The rise of hipster craft brew places with constantly rotating lists and rarely listing ABV makes this absolutely necessary.

Very excited that I can stop dreaming of it existing and use your version!

I don't have a menu handy, so I tried taking a picture of the example on your website on my monitor. The first time, it said the picture wasn't clear enough, but the second time, it's stayed hung on "Scanning now..." for over five minutes so far. Nexus 5 running Android 5.0 stock, connected to wifi.

As I was about to submit the comment, it finally finished processing, returning a list of beers that weren't in the original menu image. Not surprised, given the poor quality inherent to taking a picture of a low-res picture on a low-density LCD screen, so the only issue I see here is how long it took to process the image.

Great idea—looking forward to trying it at the pub tonight (hopefully I'll have better success there).

Very cool! This is like the beer version of WineGlass (http://wineglassapp.com/)! They managed to get ratings from CellarTracker via private access to their API (like Beer Advocate they don't offer anything publicly), so from the start that had access to the largest? library of user generated wine ratings on the web.

Are you blending user ratings with the ratebeer ratings in screenshots, or keeping them separate?

Wineglass has a feature I thought was pretty neat -- letting you know whether or not the price was 'fair for a restaurant' given typical industry markups. Perhaps not as applicable to beer, but could be a cool feature. And then you could surface 'bars with the best deals on beers you'll love.'

I'm in online wine media, so not as familiar with the beer space but it seems like lots of areas for collaboration (eg Nextglass, Untapped, BeerMenus.com as a fallback for OCR fails)

P.S. I understand the need to monetize, but having used heavily/played with dozens of apps in the wine/beer/liquor space, both free and paid, its rare to see random iAds (so far Target.com, some casino game install ad, and another casino game install ad. Perhaps the revenue is worth it but feels like there are much more interesting ways to monetize (native ads in terms of featured beers/all sorts of brewery/bar partnerships) than that sort of junky ad...

I was not able to find your privacy policy. Are you tracking what beers I'm looking up? Where I am? How long I spend drinking? Are you serving ads generally or are they somehow targeted to me based on my behavior? Do I get more privacy with the pro version?

You will be collecting data that will be useful to other people besides me. I don't care if statistics on all app users are sold but if you want to sell things based on my specific behavior I won't use your app.

All that said I'm excited to give it a try.

Nice job & congratulations on shipping! Some brief feedback before I start field testing :-) this...

- Would love the ability to save a collection of favorites, maybe add folders or tagging?

- I often get asked to create list of recommended craft beers and so would like the ability to share these lists easily

- Your data will be sparse to start with, but I'd be interested in knowing how many other users put beers into their favorites (I find the BeerAdvocate listings a bit tedious to wade through...)

- Not sure you want to, but the professional brewers I speak to are interested in a lower-cost alternative to Untappd [0] and you might be able to build a business here?

- Maybe this is an East Coast US thing, but there's a growing trend to pair beers with cheese [1]; maybe that's too specific a request but allowing used to add notes to the beers (meta data beyond BeerAdvocate) might be useful

Good luck!

[0] https://untappd.com/business [1] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/02/25/beer-cheese-pairing...

So, is this a RubyMotion app? (Asking because I'm curious, they recently released Android support in addition to iOS/OS X).

Regardless of whether or not you're using RubyMotion, would you like to share any comments or experiences about developing and releasing the app for both iOS and Android at the same time? I think it's remarkable, it seems like people pick either iOS or Android to launch. A lot of small iOS shops don't even build their Android versions in-house, they will contract the Android version out to an Android firm.

Great work on this app, I love it! Will try it out in the real world later today.

Do you integrate with Beer Advocate or Untappd for your ratings?

Great idea, good luck!

Awesome! Can't wait to try this out. Something that I wouldn't mind added would be to keep like a history of all the beers you have seen and the places you saw them at so if I am craving my favorite beer I can quickly see what spots near me i've been to have it, but then you could crowdsource it and search any restaurants anyone has been to to see if they have certain beers. Just a thought.

Oh, and if they are bottles the normal ml in the bottle and the ABV and a score saying best buy for your buck :p

Thanks for making this!

* heads off to the bar