After literally releasing 3.12 yesterday, we wanted to get some holiday offers into the app for you, but were struggling to implement all the changes in our tight turn-around time, and 3.12 was such a big shift, we'd thought we'd split this update into two versions. We thought the holiday sale was going to hold us back for longer but we made a breakthrough today and managed to get it all working and synced!

With that in mind, we managed to compile and get 3.13 out onto the app stores. This one has the usual UI tweaks and some tiny stability fixes, but more importantly it deals with all the offerings we can throw at the the stores.

And that means .... theres a 40% off deal happening right now on the app (v3.13 - hopefully Play Store in the next few hours, App Store in a day or so). We've really tried to make this as smooth and easy for you as possible, and hope it matches all your expectations.

We've got 2 more big features to get into the app this side of Christmas, so watch this space as we keep on pushing our app to cocktail greatness. Phew! What a day!

As our busiest time of the year draws upon us, we wanted to really dive into the performance of our site and see if could improve it at all. We've done most meaningful on-site tweaks over the past year or so as we continually strive for performance perfection, but we've spent the first part of today working at the network level.

With that in mind, we've done a few things. Firstly we did actually change on on-site aspect - we modified the way some dynamic data is loaded onto cocktail pages (comments mostly) so they only load when coming into view. This helps for comment heavy pages quite a bit.

But then we moved to a network level and dived into all our Cloudflare logs and data, and tried to figure out exactly what was going on with our cache, routing and more. With that in mind we found some massive performance improvements from smarter routing to smarter image compression. We also added some next level caching rules to ensure we serve cache properly (especially with images coming from email campaigns which often add querystrings for tracking and the like).

From an initial play around, the site just feels snappier, but we'll give it a few days and see the before and after metrics. Happy (performant) holidays all.

We've been working a lot behind the scenes to better help with our payment tracking, and for when people upgrade / downgrade from their app stores instead of via the in-app purchase options. With that all working properly we needed to update our app to send a bit more information, which is now all tied into 3.12.

But, although that all sounds a bit boring to most, we also did some amazing and needed UI adjustments, as well as added a few more features. Along with some bug fixes throughout, the 3.12 change-log also includes:

It really feels like the app is in such a good (and beautiful) state now but we're always striving to improve and tweak where we can! Long live 3.12 (until 3.13).

We deep dived a little (partly submerged?) into some performance issues (especially for logged in users, but also for 'guests') on cocktails and lists, and improved not only the load time, but the memory usage of those pages. They should feel a lot snappier now and hit your browsers screens that split second sooner! Performance for the win!

We've made a couple of UI touches to the website today - firstly we've increased the cocktail image area to 50% of your screen heigh when it first is shown. The visuals for our cocktails are so important and so beautiful that we just felt like we wanted to showcase those images a little more.

We also added a Christmas tree to the nav menu .... it's the small touches!

We've also put in all the ground work and code for the ability for us to add ingredients to cocktails that are a little bespoke or unique. For instance, a Green Cardamom pisco - before we just had to enter that as a single ingredient and then add some notes about how to make it which was just all part of the same big method - and the ingredient list looked a little weird.

Now we can add the Green Cardamom Pisco as an ingredient (as before), but that ingredient can have sub ingredients as part of it, and a separate method to show you how to make it. Rather than it all being jumbled up into one big ingredient list and method.

This has opened the door for us to start to add more nuanced balanced cocktails that have unique home made ingredients (which you cant just buy the pre-made for). These are usually some more of the high end crafted cocktails, so we're excited to get adding some new crafted cocktails for you all onto the site.

We've just pushed our changes up to the app stores for v3.10 of our beautiful app. There was a host of changes in this one including:

Like we said, quite a big one here. We're really happy at how much the app can now do, the way it presents, showcases and surfaces data that may be useful for you, and the flow of it all. We're never happy though, so keep your eyes peeled for some MyBar refreshes hopefully this side of Christmas ....

We've been working hard on 3.10 of our app (launching in the next couple of days) so have been squirrelling away on the API thats needed for that new version.

However we've also fixed a multiple cocktail display issue on our lists that might have cropped up for tried and want to try lists. Alongside this we've tweaks some black Friday deal issues, updated our premium pages slightly, and moved over some new UI assets. Its been go go go for us!

We've been working hard on the mobile view recently on the website, as we noticed a few issues for our mobile users (70-80% of you!). Cocktail Colin / Chris, along with the core menu have now all been altered. We've also fixed a few other layout bugs and tweaked a few bits here and there.

Along with that we've added a profanity checker to our comments component to stop people spamming with swear words / profanity in those comments. Lets keep it clean everyone!

Well, before we get onto the aforementioned new bot, a few other housekeeping changes. We changed the way level up posts mini cards are displayed to unify them with our app's UI design. We're slowing bringing our new design language over to our website where appropriate.

And then enter the arena Cocktail Colin, where you can ask this little bot any questions you have on individual cocktails. Free members get 5 free questions, where as premium members get (essentially) unlimited questions.

Imagine being on the cosmo and wondering if you can substitute an ingredient (cranberry for pomegranate anyone?), or what type of ice to use, or how to bulk batch make it .... anything you want, Colin knows the recipe, a heap of cocktail knowledge and can help you no-end.

But not only that, premium members also get access to Cocktail Chris! Imagine the above, but Chris also knows about your bar ingredients, your preferences and what you like. He can take that info and give you personalised answers based on all that knowledge. He can let you know which of your ingredients to use and how it would effect the final flavour!

Cocktail Colin is currently already in our app, but we'll be adding Cocktail Chris to our app shortly for premium members. We're also working on that '5 limit' being re-populated over time so you get a few free a month. We'll let you know as always when thats released.

We've just pushed v3.06 of our app to the App Store and Play Store. Should be with you in the next few days. This update tweaks the UI throughout to help everything be not only visually (more) beautiful but also help with some visual hierarchy (technical geekdom). We've also fixed a few bugs for you, and tweaked the way we show certain cocktails in certain conditions .... beasically a heap of visual goodness and tweaks to enhance the app's beauty!