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 [email protected].

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. 🥰

---

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. 🎉