Changelog

This past weekend, my homeland, Slovenia, was hit by the worst natural disaster in its history. The catastrophic weather saw almost a month’s worth of rainfall in 24 hours. Torrential rains ushered in widespread flooding that caused unprecedented damage. Vast areas of the country were submerged. As the waters began to recede, the aftermath became evident with destroyed homes, roads, and many collapsed bridges.

At least six people have died, and thousands have been forced to flee their homes to escape the floods, with many rescued by helicopters or firefighters in boats. The financial damage is staggering, estimated to be in the billions of euros.

Prevalje from above. Photo: Fedja Grulovic

Kamnik aftermath. Photo: Klemen Udovč

Municipalities affected by the floods are colored in orange

While my family and I were fortunate to suffer only minor damage, the same cannot be said for many of our compatriots. I’ve heard stories of families watching a lifetime of memories being washed away in mere hours. The weight of such loss is unimaginable, and the collective heartbreak of our nation is palpable.

As a gesture of solidarity, I will be donating all proceeds from this month’s Visualizer Premium subscriptions to charity organizations aiding flood victims. If you choose to subscribe now, know that your contribution will directly support those in dire need. For those already subscribed or wishing to make a personal donation, my friends wrote an article detailing various charities stepping up in this crisis. If you’re unsure which one to pick, consider donating directly here.

Please, if you can, lend a helping hand. Every bit counts.

Thank you. 🙏

OK, this is a big one. I’ve been working on this for several months, and today I’m introducing Custom Fields and Airtable integration for Premium users! Let’s dive into the details of these exciting new features. ✨

Custom Fields

One of the challenges I’ve faced is the diverse range of fields that you all want to track. Pretty much everyone wants more meta fields, but in the great words of Enrique:

there are extreme differences among people as to what those fields should be.

To solve this issue, I’ve now introduced Custom Fields. So now, if you’re a Premium user, you will see a new section in your profile settings where you can add as many custom fields as you want. Each of them will be displayed in the Edit Shot form, and also on the Shot show and comparison pages.

This should make everyone happy. Or no one. 😬

Airtable

The second part of this update is Airtable integration. It was inspired by requests from users, who wanted an easier way to perform bulk editing of shots. One user mentioned how they wanted to efficiently set the same coffee details for multiple shots instead of going through time-consuming steps of editing each Shot separately. I took several stabs at the problem, but in the end decided to leverage Airtable, a tool that already excels at bulk editing. This integration streamlines the process and provides a powerful solution for our Premium users, allowing them to edit and sync their shot data seamlessly.

The best part is that the sync works both ways. Any changes you make in Airtable will be synced back to Visualizer, and any changes you make in Visualizer will be synced to Airtable. All syncs in both directions should be nearly instantaneous. And of course, the sync includes the brand new Custom Fields introduced above.

The way you set this up is quite simple. In the profile dropdown, you select Connect Airtable, then you give Visualizer access to a workspace. Then it will create a new Shots table in that workspace and in a couple of minutes sync all your shots to Airtable.

Please note that this is still a new feature, and I’m continuously working to improve it. If you experience any issues, don’t hesitate to contact me at miha@visualizer.coffee.

Misc

Besides these two, there were many more changes. Most notable being the brand-new landing page which now includes a How-to video by Paul, explanation of what Visualizer is, a brief history of the page, and the latest blog posts. It should help new users, and anyone else who comes across this weird corner of the internet. 😄

I’ve also switched CDN provider to Skypack, since Highcharts own CDN was sometimes blocking people for peculiar reasons, and then they couldn’t see any charts. This should now be even faster, and more resilient.

Finally, the CSV (Pressensor) and Beanconqueror parsers were improved to support temperature extraction as well. I’m really happy to see how Visualizer is starting to reach outside the Decent community and being adopted by more and more coffee geeks. 🥰

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I hope you enjoy these amazing new features and that they help you take your coffee game to the next level! As always, I’m incredibly grateful for your support and can’t wait to see how you use Custom Fields and Airtable integration.

Thank you for being a part of the Visualizer community. 🎉

I am ecstatic to announce that Visualizer has now surpassed 1 million uploaded shots! It’s been an incredible journey, and I never thought we’d reach this milestone, given I started it all simply because I wanted to see the charts on a desktop screen. Thank you for your continuous support and for making Visualizer a part of your coffee experience. 🥰

I have to address the 23-minute downtime on February 28th. There were some issues with my hosting provider and there wasn’t much I could do about it. Hopefully these cases remain rare, but I’m certainly checking out alternative providers. Remember, you can always check the current status and historical uptime of Visualizer at https://status.visualizer.coffee/.

You may have noticed that there haven’t been many new features (there were some) or change log updates lately. This is because I’ve been working hard on another project since November 11th: https://business.europeancoffeetrip.com/. I’m thrilled to announce that it’s finally live! We’ve just started rolling it out, and I’m super excited about the potential of this project. My ambitions with what I can build together with European Coffee Trip¹ are massive.

At the beginning of the year, the first yearly subscription renewals were up, and I received a few disputes from members who forgot they had subscribed. To address this issue, I’ve made sure that everyone will now receive an email reminder before their subscription is renewed. Additionally, I’ve added a new Manage Subscription functionality to make it easier for Premium users to manage their account.

A while ago I switched to RoRvsWild for monitoring Visualizer, and thanks to their open-source program it’s completely free and all the stats and errors are public. Feel free to check them out.

Lastly, I’ve added preliminary support for Beanconqueror and Smart Espresso Profiler files. The former is done in cooperation with Lars, so expect more information soon and consider this a little teaser! 😉

Stay tuned for more updates, and thank you once again for being a part of Visualizer. 🎉