CellarView Wine Cellar Tracker 17+

Hard pass on this one

Not Very intuitive. Most other seller apps Elise let you scan UPC’s or have some sort of database of wines this one has nothing downloaded, opened and deleted it.

Might be okay if you only have a few bottles.

Not Intuitive

This is too hard to operate....

Could be an awesome app, but....

I purchased this app because it looked like the perfect way to organize my wines and be able to find them with ease in a beautiful graphical environment. I am sorry to say that I was disappointed from the start.

First, in order to create a cellar you have to input an address. Why?? I don’t want to give my address, that’s of nobody’s business. I could use a fake one but I fail to see the point in wasting my time inputting an address.

Second, there’s no easy way of adding bottles to my cellar. There is no database of any sort, or a way to pull data from a .csv file. If you are like me that have over 200 different wines, be prepared to spend a month adding wines. You even have to create every winery’s data from scratch!

Last, the app crashed a few times for no apparent reason. I updated my phone’s iOS to the latest version and still crashes.

As I said, I would have liked this to work but it lacks stability and basic features. At the price point for this app (not expensive, but way above the average of other wine cellar apps) this is a no buy. I would like my money back (or the issues above fixed).

Developer Response ,

Thank you for your feedback. I can't help but to share your view on CellarView’s potential for awesomeness and firmly believe that inviting and responding to customer feedback is essential to developing great software. Yours is therefore very much appreciated!

As you know, CellarView is a relatively new software product. Version 1.0 was released about 3 months ago and some of the current functionality is intentionally “foundational”. My plan is to continue to build upon this foundation in future releases.

Address information, for example, will be used to support automatic Wine List loading. As you (and your phone) move from one place to another (say from your home to a restaurant where you have a wine locker), the Wine List will automatically update to show you the wines stored in the location closest to your phone's current position (in this case, the restaurant). You will be able to enable/disable this feature via CellarView Settings and it can only be enabled if you've also granted CellarView permission to access to your phone's current position while you are using it. That said, your comments have helped me to see how providing address information could make some people uncomfortable and I will update the software as you've suggested (will make supplying address information optional).

Likewise, the current structured approach to collecting wine data enables the data aggregation required to support search (and perhaps label scan) in future releases. The vision is to routinely collect publicly available Appellation information from various governing bodies and aggregate it with customer (and perhaps externally) supplied Brand, Wine and Vintage information into a single, searchable resource.

I’m intrigued by your .csv file suggestion and would like to hear more. Version 1.5 (in development) already includes .csv export/import capabilities to facilitate the utilization of iCloud services to perform data synchronization across multiple devices. I imagine this export/import functionality could be extended to load and/or convert data from other Cellar Management solutions. In what format(s) could you most easily provide your current data? How do you imagine this would work? Ideally, how would you like to interact with the software?

Finally, please accept my apologies for the stability issues you are having and any inconvenience they may have caused. I assure you that both Apple and I perform testing prior to posting a release on the App Store. Unfortunately this testing is sometimes imperfect and I have zero visibility to your crashes or bugs unless you take steps to share this information with me. Should you choose to, here are 4 options for sharing this information:

1) Go to Settings > Privacy, scroll down and tap Analytics. Then tap “Share iPhone Analytics” and then “Share With App Developers”. This setting will cause crash reports (these reports contain only information about what the software was doing when it crashed; none of your data is visible) to be automatically forwarded to the developers of the apps installed on your device. I look for CellarView reports multiple times each week and follow-up on every single report I receive. I release updates frequently and make every effort to correct serious problems (e.g., crashes) as soon as possible.

2) CellarView itself includes a way for you to Report Problems (on the More Screen under the Information & Support section). You can use Report Problems to send an email describing the problem you're having or to suggest a feature you’d like to see in a future release.

3) You can also send an email directly to CellarViewApp@gmail.com. The same address used by Report Problem, but this option provides further flexibility by allowing you to attach screen shots which can often be very helpful in diagnosing and correcting errors.

4) You can post on CellarView's Support page at https://www.facebook.com/CellarViewApp/

Thank you again for your feedback! Hopefully, this addresses your concerns. If so, I'd like to ask you to please consider revising your review (either now or when future releases are delivered). If not, or should you have additional suggestions, questions or concerns, please feel free to contact me directly at CellarViewApp@gmail.com.