We've recently shipped, to Android and iOS, our new v3.05 app, and boy is it juicy! It comes with the usual bug fixes and tweaks (not many now tbh) but also a few new powerful features and updates.

We changed the method to also show an abbreviated ingredient list right alongside it, so the amounts of each are easy to see and use, without having to scroll up to the ingredient list again. We also added some nice icons for each ingredients beneath it. Not important, but visually sexy!

But, two huge new features dropped in v3.05 as well. Firstly we added the ability to upload your own pictures / photos of any cocktails you make to the comments section on the app. So you can create the cocktail and take a photo for all to see!! Get snapping!

And then, we added a feature we've been pondering and figuring out for a long time - ask Cocktail Colin. This beautiful powerful feature allows you to ask Cocktail Colin (/our fine-tuned cocktail AI) anything about the cocktail, from substitutions, to tweaks, to using what you have and more. He has all the context of the cocktail and knows his stuff.

We've given 5 free uses to all free members, and unlimited (essentially) to all premium members. We hope this really helps you elevate your cocktail game!

Phew! What an app update!

We've made a few small, but useful, improvements to our cocktail page on the old tinternet.

We've added the ingredient amounts, as a list, right above the method so its easily accessible when following along with the method. We've also moved the 'Can you make' boxes around slightly to be better placed and improve the flow of the page.

Small, but mighty, updates as we continually try and make the best cocktail solution out there for you all.

When it rains it pours over here and Make Me a Cocktail central! We finally found time to properly update our beautifully crafted website to a new underlying version of our UI framework (tailwind version 4). And once we did that, it opened up the possibility for us to start to migrate some old packages to newer more slick versions. Theres lots more to come here, but this was a huge undertaking - and one we're really super happy at!

But then on the back of that, we took the opportunity to update some small UI glitches on the website, but more importantly updated all the list and cocktail cards to our new look (that is present in the app). You'll see a much nicer, slicker card now when viewing cocktails and lists.

Again, theres more to come here as we slowly migrate over some more of the site to this newer UI, but we hope you all enjoy this new update. Watch this space!!

We've done 3 incremental updates to our beautiful app as we slowly try and get feature parity (to an extent) between the website and app! We've added private tasting notes, fixed a Buy Next bug, completely overhauled the UI for that section, changed the cocktail screen to be more uniform in its icons, some UI tweaks there, given everyone 4 free power tooltips, fixed some backend bugs and a host of other changes.

The version number might have only gone from 3.0.0 -> 3.0.3 but there was a lot of new stuff in those 3 updates!

AAAAANNNNNDDDDDD ...... we got Android all sorted and released. Android is now in parity, with that version hitting 3.0.3 as well. Phew, what an absolute bumper app update for you all!

It's been a while since we've had time to concentrate on some of the core underlying features on our beautiful site and app. However we've found some time today and we've put it to good use....

We've updated all our underlying packages and framework (Laravel) to the latest versions, as well as removing some old packages we no longer need or use. Alongside that we've gone through our exception tracker and just put a few more failsafes / catches in place where people are getting a few errors.

99% of the time it's usually a hacker who is trying to manipulate the URL string, and although they never succeed, we aren't catching the exceptions properly and it throws a small wobbly. Little things but stops our issue tracker from gathering more and more 'issues'.

There's still work to be done here, but we've also been hard at work on our app which we pushed to v3.0.0 on iOS, and hopefully will push out 3.0.0 on android shortly. Theres a heap of new things in there including:

And more!

Watch this space in the build up to Christmas where we've got some big changes coming for both the App and Web! Cocktails ahoy!

We've become a little addicted to enhancing the performance on our site, removing a heap of SQL calls and optimising various views. To that end we've cut down the amount of work that various pages have to do now, so they load up even snappier, and put less stain on our database and CPU's. Completely irrelevant for you all, but its good to know we care about it all, isnt it? :)

In terms of content - we've also added 5 new delicious cocktails to the site for you, as well as enhancing a couple of our lists. Nice work us (/me)!

We've spent the morning doing a good old code cleanup and performance review. We ran our code through a few different code quality tools, fixed some syntactical inconsistencies and upgraded some calls to the latest versions. We also formalised our code structure.

But also, more importantly for you, we've spent a long time optimising our code to remove a heap of N+1 problems, irrelevant queries we no longer need, added some new database indexes we noticed we were missing and just generally sped the whole site over a heap of different areas.

We undertook this as we prepare for a summer of new additions coming your way. Watch this space.

We've spent a bit of time recently tidying up our backend processes to be a little more streamlined, and a little less cumbersome. Obviously you wont really notice anything we've done (although we did make a tiny few UI adjustments in the front end) but the work we put in here just free's up time down the line for us to concentrate on other aspects.

However we have also updated a heap of images on our lists (which were all looking, frankly, a little horrible), and also wrote some scripts to auto recognise cocktails in out level up series, and adding our beautiful recipe cards into them if it finds any.

We've done a quick visual tidy up on our posts, level up and blog. We now show time to read, word counts, some sub heading and made the reading content area more pleasing to the eye; we've generally increased our visual appeal with some extra UI touches.

The should be a lot nicer to read now, and hopefully the extra meta gives you more info upfront.

See our Surprising Mocktail Recipes That Taste Like the Real Thing for an example.

We noticed an error in our email webhook calls which meant that failed email sends werent being logged, and deal with (i.e. unsubscribed) from our email lists. We _think_ we've caught this now, so any failed messages sent should automatically be removed from the email list. Fingers crossed.

To note this would not have effected unsubscribes, which were working perfectly!