Sipped

(Shhhh it's a friend). We have our first customer. It a friend of mine, so thank you Matthew, but I'll take it. Hopefully it's the start of a long journey. We will be implementing some bug fixes, for stability, in the short term and introducing some more exciting features soon.

Sipped previously had been available only on the South African App Store. After we worked through some product fine-tuning and and bug fixes we have made the app available in all the App Store regions.

Several selectable regions are now available to the user to help them measure their drinks according to their countries measurements. We currently support drink measurements from the UK, US, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and South Africa.

So far we have one subscriber, a friend that is supporting the product. But it is a start.

Today Sipped was launched in the South African App Store (that is the country I am from). I am very excited but know that it is only the beginning of the work ahead. The next steps involve fixing up the one or two bugs that will surely come with the increase in usage and then it on to incorporate the drinks for the UK and USA.

Apple recently announced a new UI framework called SwiftUI. This was perfect timing as I was not ready to trek through UIKit and Core Data to build this app. Therefore I began using SwiftUI from the start after training my machine learning model using Apple's Create ML app. I had dreams of building an app that could be used over iOS, iPadOS and MacOS using SwiftUI. Being a huge Mac fan I was so excited to analyse what I had drunk during the month on my Mac just by taking photos of it on my iPhone. The idea was inspiring. Along with the release of SwiftUI Apple also released a Core Data Cloud Kit syncing framework, which meant I could store my data in the cloud simply by writing it to my device.

The MVP began and in short several routes were explored along the journey of creating the MVP. I used Firebase as a core MVP starter and later shifted all my "backend server" requirements to CloudKit. During the course of development, I got a designer to jump onboard to restrict my endless (but not great) UI design work, further acting as a constraint for all my dreams, otherwise, I would keep tweaking the app and never launching it.

Something so simple as tracking what you drink turns out to be a mammoth task, as it always is with software development. Certain things had to be put in place to scale for other countries to use the app correctly, for example, a glass of wine in the UK was a different volume and thus amount of units in the US.

After playing around with some ideas I began the MVP build.

I was asked if I drank ever whiskey every day. I knew the answer was no but I was not sure how much whiskey I drank during the week. I began to think about logging my drink on the classic excel spreadsheet, however, I thought that someone surely had made an app for this... A drinks trackers app, a drinks diary or alcohol tracker.

As I expected there were many apps out there. However, most of them were sober apps to quit drinking. Digging further into the App Store I found a couple more tracker applications but they took to long to add drinks to accumulate my drinks data. You had to add the volume of the drink, the alcohol percentage and after all of that, it was hard to find a meaningful interpretation of all this data in a summary or graph format.

Surely I could take a photo of my whiskey in front my me and using my iPhone, through machine learning could recognise it.

Thus the idea for Sipped began.

(The app was going to be called Nowell after Alexander Nowell who accidentally invented the beer bottle.)