Did the BeerVision app vanish completely?

Looks like the “beervisionapp” vanished two years ago, seemingly not long after the guy posted a blurb about it in RB and other places online… He existed for one week in 2017, just seems a little hoaxy in hindsight. Or maybe someone bought him out – website is gone, FB inactive.

Anyone here know if this beer menu scanner idea is still being developed somewhere as an AR project?

Trying to figure out if I should make one or if one exists/is nearing release so I should be more patient. :smirk:

Funny
I downloaded the app years ago because I wanted to test the scanner function, and I never tried it

So it sounds like a nice function to have: scan a menu and see all the beer scores at once. Would people use that nowadays?

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Before I can order I spend 20 minutes checking every beer manually.
I would love if at once I could see:

  • it’s on RB
  • my score if I rated it
  • average score
    That would save a lot of time.
    (although breweries tend to list their beers on boards, and menus are for the few beerbars around here)
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I discontinued it mainly because it’s unsustainable. The only reason it worked so well was that I crawled websites with a home botnet of laptops, then I had to manually merge this data, so I have a giant csv of all the beer names across the websites (then I had excruciatingly complicated logic to figure out how to “merge” same beers which are named differently). Then I had even more complicated logic to figure out which words from the bag of words is likely to be associated with an actual beer because a menu could be full of long descriptions or unrelated words, including one branch which detects if the menu is from a specific craft brewery so you can still get all the right beers even if you’re in an obscure craft brewery.

It did work better than literally any other beer app out there, and the accuracy was fine, but I noticed some merging bugs which I had to write increasingly complicated logic for (like how do you know Blue Moon from Miller-Coors is actually the same as Blue Moon from its subsidiary which Miller-Coors bought, and apply this to all other similar cases). The whole web scraping thing was also starting to get very tedious especially since I expected to make zero money from the app and my only real user is myself. Without the constant webscraping, new beers will not be recognized and my app would decline in quality, so I just kinda let it die. Maybe I will work on it again in the future.

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Sorry about the 2nd necro but I just wanted to give an update that I actually fixed the most pressing issues and was able to get the app up and running again on both app stores. I’ll try to add a few more features and further improve the accuracy in the next week or so, and hopefully I’ll maintain it longer than I did last time!