iPhone Integration Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
User Interface Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
Re-use Value Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars
Overall Rating: 3.17 out of 5 stars
I have to admit it; I love a good quality beer. I am always looking, comparing, tasting, and enjoying new beers whenever I have the opportunity. The problem that I often run into is finding a great beer in some small brewery tucked away in some small town, and completely forgetting what that beer was a week later. Now, this fantastic micro-brew can be documented on my iPhone thanks to ThatsTheSpirit.
ThatsTheSpirit is a database for the adult beverage. It is easy to document everything from a fine wine to the finest scotch. Long gone are the days of sipping a fine wine, telling yourself you have to buy this when you get home, and then completely forgetting what the wine was. Entering these spirits could not be any easier thanks to the simple interface. Choose from predefined beverage types, enter the name, cost, where you had it, and more into a simple database. You can even attach a photo of the bottle to the entry so you have an easy visual reference. Finding the drink is just as easy thanks to a simple search feature.
This is a great start for a spirit database, but there are a few things that would have really made this a superior app. The app may contain the ability to enter in hard liquors and beers, but the setup is most certainly geared to the wine coinsure. Including a line item for who produces beverages would also go miles to increasing the usefulness of this database. Also, being able to modify the price so people can know it was $10 for a four pack of beer, and not just a generic $10 entry would really help with budget conscious shoppers. The last bit that could really use a modification is the ability to edit drink types, as the predefined list is fine, but it is not comprehensive by any stretch.
This is a good start to helping you track those fine adult beverages, but it is not quite the comprehensive app some might hope for. It is worth picking up if you enjoy a wide variety of drinks and hate forgetting them at a later time; just know there are some constraints you will have to work around.
For those of you who have, need, or are interested in databases, Filemaker Pro is the most complete database software offered on the Mac platform (it’s also on the PC but I’m not familiar enough with thePC version to make any claims). Compared to other database software platforms, it is fairly easy to use, and more importantly, easy to keep up with. It isn’t as easy to use as Filemaker’s other software, Bento, but if you are building a large, complex database, it’s far and away the best choice.
Filemaker Go is the mobile platform for Filemaker Pro. It allows users to view, edit, and search Filemaker Pro records that are either on the server, or loaded directly to your iDevice via iTunes file sharing.
The new version, version 1.1, lets users do three critical things that the previous version didn’t allow:
Filemaker Go can now produce PDF’s from within the app. “This feature lets mobile users easily save and distribute reports, create invoices, and share project status directly from their iPad or iPhone.”
The new update now lets you insert photos that were taken with, or are stored in, your iDevice. Photos stored in the Filemaker database can also be emailed out to others.
Other file types within your database, such as the database itself, can be emailed directly from Filemaker Go
“FileMaker Go for iPhone and FileMaker Go for iPad have stirred up huge excitement in the FileMaker community and beyond. Initial acceptance has been strong and this is just the beginning,” said Ryan Rosenberg, vice president of marketing and services for FileMaker, Inc. “With these free updates, we are already making both apps even more powerful and adding new ways to share information remotely.”
In a piece of very happy news, David Petrou, a project lead for Google speaking at the Hot Chips symposium, announced that Google Goggles will be coming to the App Store by years end. If you’ve never seen it in action, Google Goggles is just about the neatest thing to hit the mobile world, well, since the iPhone.
What Google Goggles does is take images from your phones camera and then runs a search on them. For example, if you take a picture of the cover of a book, Google Goggles will identify the book and run a search, giving you info and purchase options. What’s really cool though is that you can also search for artwork in museums, famous landmarks, famous faces, text on a page, and more.
Like most things in life though, the app is not always correct and doesn’t have every place or item in its database. Yet. According to Petro, “New photos compared to the database can be correctly identified about 50 to 60 percent of the time, with a false positive rate of about one in 10,000.” According to a review in the Washington Post, the results are sometimes a bit puzzling. “While Goggles could recognize the UPC for a 15.4-inch MacBook Pro as well as the box the MacBook came in, it oddly didn’t recognize the distinctive Apple logo on the box.”
According to the promo youtube video, future versions of Google Goggles will be able to do far more things than the current version, including “suggesting moves in a chess game and identifying a plant from the picture of a leaf.” There are also plans to use augmented reality rather than using pictures, something that could definitely make the experience much better.
Be sure to look out for Google Goggles in the App Store before years end. The best part is that like most things Google, it’ll be free.
SongStumblr is a nifty new app that lets you see what nearby users are listening to. The developers call it “geosocial” music discovery/sharing—SongStumblr lets you see and hear your neighbors’ music, as well as broadcasting your own. Here’s what the developers have to say about the app’s functionality:
Users can listen to discovered songs from other users for free, purchase songs, or find information about songs from online databases. Users can control their own music which will be shared, right from within the application, with an inbuilt music controller with customizable colors, or by running the application in the background and using the default iPod™ App. (Although being an iOS 4.0 feature, it will run on 3.0 and above.)
Basically? Share your music, and see what’s playing nearby. Because it’s Bluetooth-powered, you don’t even need an internet connection to hear what nearby users are listening to. If you see a song you like, you can add it to your database for later reference. SongStumblr can also display your saved songs on a map, to give you an idea of what you’ve heard and where.
Of course, SongStumblr’s usefulness is tied to how many users are broadcasting their songs…so it should come as no surprise that the newly-released app is currently free. If localized music sharing and discovery sounds interesting to you, go ahead and give SongStumblr a try.
The entrepreneur dynamic duo Janus Friis with Niklas Zennström has officially launched the Rdio service to the public. You may remember Janus and Niklas as the two who started KaZaa, Skype, and Joost. Up until today, you needed an invitation to use the service. The music streaming service starts at a cost of $4.99 per month. However the service is currently open to users in the U.S. and Canada.
There is a 3 day trial that is advertisement free too. The web only version of the service is $4.99, but if you want to use the service on a mobile device — it costs $9.99 per month. Rdio has about 7 million songs in their database after working with several independent labels. Rdio has agreements in place with IODA, Iris, INgrooves, Finetunes, and The Orchard.
I have to admit it; I love a good quality beer. I am always looking, comparing, tasting, and enjoying new beers whenever I have the opportunity. The problem that I often run into is finding a great beer in some small brewery tucked away in some small town, and completely forgetting what that beer was a week later. Now, this fantastic micro-brew can be documented on my iPhone thanks to ThatsTheSpirit.
This is a great start for a spirit database, but there are a few things that would have really made this a superior app. The app may contain the ability to enter in hard liquors and beers, but the setup is most certainly geared to the wine coinsure. Including a line item for who produces beverages would also go miles to increasing the usefulness of this database. Also, being able to modify the price so people can know it was $10 for a four pack of beer, and not just a generic $10 entry would really help with budget conscious shoppers. The last bit that could really use a modification is the ability to edit drink types, as the predefined list is fine, but it is not comprehensive by any stretch.
For those of you who have, need, or are interested in databases, Filemaker Pro is the most complete database software offered on the Mac platform (it’s also on the PC but I’m not familiar enough with thePC version to make any claims). Compared to other database software platforms, it is fairly easy to use, and more importantly, easy to keep up with. It isn’t as easy to use as Filemaker’s other software, Bento, but if you are building a large, complex database, it’s far and away the best choice.
In a piece of very happy news, David Petrou, a project lead for Google speaking at the 
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