First of all, happy new year! 🥳

Even though I haven’t written a post here, I’m sure you’ve noticed a couple of changes since the last update.

Push Notifications 📱

The most noticeable addition is the ability to enable push notifications for new shots. If your browser supports it, you can enable it in the shot list or in the profile settings. Most browsers fully support this feature, though iOS Safari users will need to add Visualizer to their home screen first.

For me personally it’s a massive improvement in my workflow. I’ve discussed it on Discord before, but a short recap:

1. Pull a shot
2. Get push notification on my phone
3. Edit everything on Visualizer
4. Optionally create new coffee bag with AI-powered data filling
5. Tap Download in DYE

Just like that, all info is beautiful and synchronized everywhere. 🪄

API Changes

I’ve added new API endpoints that allow you to list and get details of roasters and coffee bags if you’ve enabled Coffee Bag Management.

Changes to Premium

I almost never talk about what’s coming next, but this time I’ll make an exception. Handling all the worldwide tax registrations and keeping up with regulation changes is getting harder and harder. It’s coming to a point where it’s simply overwhelming for a one-person side project. For that reason, I’ve decided to transition away from Stripe to a Merchant of Record service. As I stated in the Black Friday update, Visualizer Premium prices will not increase. Any extra fees will simply reduce my cut.

This transition will require significant development time, which means fewer new features in the coming weeks. More importantly, when the transition is ready, you’ll receive emails from me/Stripe about migrating your subscription data. I’m telling you this now so you won’t worry when those emails arrive - they’re legitimate and expected. I’ll send you an email personally when the migration begins! 📬

Miscellaneous

There were also a bunch of little improvements, like immediately clearing the combo box field when you click/tap it. This enables you to immediately start typing and selecting a new value. Another small UX improvement is that now, while on the shot list page, you can just drag and drop your shot files anywhere. They’ll be instantly uploaded and added to the shot list.

There were also some bug fixes, like the peculiar behavior of shot times and their time zones. Or non-matching coffee bags by their roast dates when enabling Coffee Bag Management.

As always, you can check the entire changelog to see all the nitty gritty details of UI/UX changes and other tiny improvements that didn’t make it to the list above.

Thank you, and again, happy new year! 🎉

Way back in March 2022 Christoph asked if I could add some sort of categorization to Shots. I made a GitHub issue to add tags, added it to my personal Visualizer To Do board in Obsidian, and then…nothing. Until today!

All Premium users can now add tags to their shots. No limits whatsoever, so go as wild as you want. After adding tags, you can filter all shots by tag, making it super easy to find exactly what you’re looking for.

If you’re not yet a Premium user, you can give it a shot (see what I did there?) with the extended 37-day free trial until the end of the year. Then the anti-black-friday will be over and we’re back to the standard 7-day trial. Not nothing, but, you know, not 37! 😅

A big new thing that you’ve probably seen by now is the Yearly Brew 2024! Last year I really rushed the feature, and while I was satisfied with the result, I knew I could do better. This year I took my time, and I’m thrilled with how it turned out. 🥳

The Coffee Bag AI got some improvements too - it now scrapes and stores tasting notes. I was somewhat hesitant about bringing AI to Visualizer, but seeing so many of you use and love this feature has been amazing.

There’s also something quite nerve-wracking: we’re now running on Ruby 3.4.0-rc1 and Tailwind 4.0 Beta. I like living on the edge, and what started as curiosity turned into “well, it works, so why not ship it?” But if you spot any issues, please let me know! 🙏

As always, there were tons of other changes since the last update - styling touch-ups, UX improvements, and more. Check out the changelog if you’re curious.

Every time I look at Visualizer today, I have to pinch myself. What started as a weird little experiment in 2020 somehow grew into this amazing community of coffee nerds sharing their shots, discoveries, and occasional disasters. Not a day goes by without me being absolutely mind-blown by all of this. 🤯

Thank you, thank you, thank you!

Whether you’re decorating the Christmas tree, lighting the menorah, raising an aluminum pole, or just enjoying a quiet cup of coffee - may your holidays be merry and your extractions perfect! 🎄✡️☕️

Cheers,
Miha 🥂

If you’ve been following Visualizer for a while, you know I’m not one to jump on hype trains. While I typically brush off requests to “add AI” due to their lack of practical value, there are legitimate use cases for LLMs beyond the buzzwords - especially when it comes to automating repetitive tasks.

Today, I’m introducing the first such feature: coffee bag information extraction. If you’re using Coffee Management, you can now paste a URL of a coffee you want to add, and Visualizer will try to get all the relevant information automagically. And of course, you maintain complete control - no information is saved until you submit the form.

This is an early preview and I’m learning too. If something doesn’t work quite right, please let me know with examples. And if you have ideas about other meaningful ways to integrate LLM features into Visualizer, I’m all ears. And, as always, you can check out the diff if you’re interested in the technical details.

Since Coffee Management is a Premium feature, this new capability is also available only to Premium subscribers. But with the temporarily extended 37-day trial, now might be a perfect time to give it a try. 😉