How is Clinks different from other wine apps on the iPhone OS? We’re very focused on the social aspect of wine, as you can see in this screenshot:

Here’s a first cut at a teaser video for Clinks 2.0

Taste, Share, Discover: Clinks redefines the wine journal via effortless sharing of tasting notes with Facebook friends and visual analysis of tasting palates, all for free

San Francisco, CA – Clinks, Inc. is pleased to announce the immediate availability of Clinks, a tasting journal for wine enthusiasts that’s been crafted for utility, speed, and delight. With Clinks, the user can keep track of the wines they taste, share their recommendations with their friends, and discover what they and their friends really enjoy. The new release offers groundbreaking sharing capabilities via Facebook Connect, and a unique graphical analysis of their and their friends’ tasting palates.

“The concept of a wine journal seems simple,” said Deeje Cooley, co-founder and lead developer for Clinks, “but getting the details right is important. What’s the most important detail? Wine is social! When designing Clinks, we wanted to make it fast and easy to enter and retrieve tasting notes, and simple and fun to share tasting notes with friends. By tasting, sharing, and discovering, Clinks has helped us grow as wine enthusiasts, and we hope it helps you.”

Clinks starts with a tasting note form where all fields are in one context. A ‘Next’ button glides the user through the fields to fill in, and customized data pickers for each field help reduce text entry. The rating process has been vastly simplified using a thumbs up metaphor, which the user can adjust in the 100-pt scale. In the Journal view, the user can see what they’ve tasted recently or what they like most, based on their own ratings. The user can also easily filter their journal based on name, varietal, appellation, flavor, pairing, and more. And of course, the user can attach photos of labels to their tasting notes, then tilt their device sideways to flick thru the labels. This visual aid helps the user find their favorite wines at the store much more easily.

What sets Clinks apart from all the other wine apps for iPhone is its social sharing and palate analyzing features. After the user enters some tasting notes, Clinks provides a visual summary of their favorite types and flavors, helping the user to better understand their palate. When the user connects Clinks to their Facebook account, all their tasting notes are automatically synchronized to the Clinks server, and all their Facebook friends’ Clinks journals are synchronized to their device, completely in the background and without interrupting the user at all. Now the user can browse and filter their friends’ journals and analyze their palates to see what tastes they like and share with themselves. With Clinks, the user will know exactly what to bring to the next dinner party!

Minimum Requirements:

• iPhone and iPod touch 2.2 or later

Pricing and Availability:

• Clinks Lite is available for free, and patrons can purchase Clinks for $4.99 (USD), at the iPhone App Store.

Links:

• Clinks – http://clinks.tv
• Download – http://clinks.tv/download
• Screenshot – http://www.clinks.us/blog/2009/07/clinks-2-0-screenshots/
• App Icon – http://www.clinks.us/images/clinks_logo_10_181x181px.png

Clinks, Inc. was started in late 2008 to help wine enthusiasts increase their enjoyment of wine. Clinks was created by entrepreneurs with decades of experience in user interface analytics, design, and development. Copyright 2009 Clinks, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Apple, the Apple logo, iPhone and iPod are registered trademarks of Apple Computer in the U.S. and/or other countries.

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Contact: Deeje Cooley, Co-Founder deeje@clinks.biz 415-203-7801

These can be used by others for news and reviews.

Here are a few screenshots of the next version of Clinks. We’ve incorporated friends via Facebook Connect, as well as a powerful profile analytics features, so you can better understand your flavor profile as well as those of your friends.

Version 1.1 is now available and includes the following enhancements:

• label picture search – in addition to grabbing a label picture from the camera or library, you can now search for a label picture using Google Images based on the product fields
• fullscreen color picker – when in the color field, tilt your device sideways, hold your beverage up to the white space, and move the slider to the matching color
• enhanced filtering – much quicker and much more responsive
• Thumbs appear in Journal view when sorting by Recent, numerical ratings appear when sorting by Top Rated
• miscellaneous improvements

The Settings tab in Clinks provides a variety of customization options:

• Define a default event to automate and simplify a day full of journal entries
• Set up Twitter to automatically post summaries to your Twitter feed
• Switch between simple and advanced field sets during Add

Default Events

This feature is specifically design for use during wine tasting and beer festivals. Each entry in your journal can capture the name and location of an event where that beverage was tasted, and rather than enter that data each time in those fields, you can enter that information in the Default Events section.

Furthermore, you can tell Clinks to keep this information for the duration of the day, and then automatically clear out the Default Events fields after the event is over. In this way you don’t need to remember to reset these fields yourself.

Finally, you can quickly see that default info is set in the Add screen, which will display either the default event name or default event location if and when either field is set.

Twitter

You can configure Clinks to automatically post new and edited entries to your Twitter feed. Scores 86 (one thumb up) and above are included in the post. Also, if you enter a Twitter tag in the Default Events section (see above) those tags will be appended to the post.

Add Fields

By default, when you add a new entry to your journal, you can enter basic information about the wine or beer, a flavor, rating, pairing, and a comment. You can turn on advanced fields, such as color, tannins, finish, and body. All fields are visible when you edit an entry from the Journal view.

Challenge

A wine and beer journal needs to do at least two things really well: make data entry as easy as possible, and make data retrieval as quick and intuitive as possible.

Key challenges include:

• At a wine tasting or beer festival, you want to quickly see what you’ve already tasted and what you liked
• At a store, you want to quickly recall a particular beverage, or recall a beverage based on a particular aspect such as flavor or pairing.
• Beverages can be most easily identified by their label, though remembering and describing a label is very difficult.

Solution

The Journal view in Clinks provides a wealth of features that make it easy to quickly wines and beers you’ve tried and liked, in a form factor that is clean and very legible.

Features include:

• At the top of the list, you can switch the sort order between Recent and Top Rated.
• You can filter the list on a variety of fields, such as varietal, pairing, or event.
• You can touch on any item in the list to review, edit, or email the entry for that item. Deleting an entry from the list works as expected.
• You can flip your device sideways to enter Label Flow mode, where you can flick thru the labels to find a match on the store shelves or show to a wine or beer clerk.

Sorting

Below you can see both the Recent and Top Rated sorting orders for a particular user’s journal

Note that in the 1.1 release, your ratings is shown as thumbs, while in Top Rated, your rating is shown as a numerical value.

Filtering

You can enter text to filter your entries using the following fields:

• any of brand, type vintage, region
• event name or location
• pairing
• aroma or flavor
• comment

Here are some illustrations of filters using a particular user’s journal data:

The filter functionality works as expected:

• The clear field button clears out the current filter term
• The Cancel button clears out the filter field and hides the keyboard
• The Search button in the keyboard hides the keyboard and makes the filter term “sticky”. This means that as long as Clinks is running, only entries that pass the filter are displayed. You can use this capability, for instance, to filter on an event, then add entries for that event, and see them listed automatically.
• You can sort the filtered list by Recent or Top Rated.

Label Flow

At any time, you can flip your device sideways to enter Label Flow mode, where the label pictures for your journal entries are displayed and you cna flick thru then back and forth. This is particularly useful when your perusing the liquor shelves of a local store, or trying to show a sommelier or wine clerk a wine you’re looking to find or match.

(For the technically inclined, our Label Flow implementation does not use undocumented APIs.)

Editing

You can easily edit your entries within the Journal view:

• To delete an entry, simply swipe your finger left to right across an entry, then touch the Delete button.
• To view or edit and entry, simply touch the entry to enter its detail view. Touch the Journal button in the navigation bar to return to Journal view. If you want to add or change data in an entry, make the change then touch the Save button in the navigation bar.
• Bonus: you can email an entry to yourself or your friends by touching the email icon in the header of the detail view.

Challenge

Mobile devices, in general, are not great for large amounts of data entry. The iPhone, in particular, is even more challenges when it comes to data entry due to its touchscreen keyboard.

When it comes to keeping a journal of wine and beer, there are many aspects to be considered:

• There are many aspects to wine and beer to consider and appreciate.
• Entering data should be quick and hassle-free, and shouldn’t detract from experiencing and enjoying the beverage.
• If you are going to record information about a beverage on your mobile device, you often have your beverage in one hand and your mobile device in the other, and data my be entered single-handedly.

Solution

Safari on the iPhone has a feature called Form Assistant, which makes it easy to navigate form fields within web pages. Clinks extends the concept of the Form Assistant to native data forms. Adding to your journal means filling out a form with as much or as little data as you like, then touching the Save button.

The Form Assistant in Clinks offers the following features and benefits:

• When a field is selected, a keyboard or picker appears at the bottom of the screen. The Form Assistant bar appears above the keyboard/picker area.
• Next and Prev buttons move between fields, and are located in a consistent place for quick muscle memory. Fields automatically scroll into view as you down or up the form.
• Many fields have pickers to make long values easier to enter. A picker is displayed in the same area as the keyboard.
• Free-form pickers provide typical values, but you’ll occasionally want to enter something not in our lists. You can easily hide the picker and enable the keyboard by touching the write icon in the middle of the Form Assistant bar. You can also enter keyboard mode by selecting “other…” and then touching Next.
• Touching on the info button toggles the Form Assistant into info mode and brings up a description of the field; touching again returns to entry mode. You can even leave the Form Assistant in info mode and step thru the fields to learn what each is for and how it relates to wine or beer.
• If you reach the last field and then touch Next, the form scrolls back to the top and the Form Assistant dismisses itself. From here you can scroll thru the form to review your data, then touch Save to add it to your Journal.
• All of these features combine to make data entry easy with just one hand, so you don’t have to put down your wine or beer to rate it!

Below are screenshots and descriptions of some of the many fields available in Clinks for wine and beer.

Brand

The brand field is where you identify the brand of wine or beer. Be sure NOT to enter the type of beverage here, just the name.

Beverage Types

The type field helps you identify the type of beverage you are drinking. Wine can be categorized as either red or white. Furthermore, wine is often defined either by the land on which the grapes were grown on (appellation) or by the dominant type of grape used (varietal). Selecting the first two segments determines what types appear in the third section. This picker will help you quickly learn the difference between old-world and new-world wines!

Beer can similarly be broken down into different types, and some types have further classifications.

Vintage

The vintage field only applies to wine, and is used to determine what year the grapes were harvested. It lists the last 20 years, and if you’re drinking something older than that, you can enter keyboard mode to enter the year.

Color

The color field will display colors appropriate for the type of beverage your are entering: red wine, white wine, or beer. Note that when entering a wine, the choice you make in the type field determines which set of colors appears here, automatically!

Aroma and Flavor

The aromas and flavors you experience can be as unique as you are. The pickers for aromas/flavors are distinct for wine and beer. There is also an intensity field for both aroma and flavor.

Palate

In addition to flavor, these are the other attributes you can capture, depending on the beverage type: sweetness, acidity, tannins, body, and finish.

Rating

Love it or hate it, most everyone uses a 100-point rating scale for wine. The problem is, people give too much weight to ratings provided by just a handful of critics, and don’t have the skills or the desire to calculate a rating at this resolution level.

For Clinks, we created a simple mapping between the common “thumbs-up” rating model and the 100-point scale, so that you can easily rate your favorite and not-so-favorite wines, and appreciate how others rate things in context. By moving the large thumb picker, Clinks automatically moves the smaller 100-point scale picker. A middle-of-the-road beverage gets 80 points, one thumbs up gets 86 points, and two thumbs up gets 92 points. You can also fine-tune your ratings by tapping on the 100-point scale, and there’s plenty of headroom to rate things a bit higher.

Pairing

Your experience of a wine or beer can change dramatically depending on what food you’re pairing it with, so its important to note it here. If your pairing isn’t in our preset list, drop into keyboard mode to enter it.

Info

Any any time, you can toggle the Form Assistant into info mode to learn more about each field, like this…

Here at Clinks, we believe in the following philosophies concerning software:

• Listen
• Solve Problems
• Be Focused
• Be Solid
• Be Responsive
• Be Delightful
• Ship early and often

Listen

Great products know who their customers are.

We’ve been successfully using a market research process called SyncDev to understand who our target customers are, and their challenges when it comes to wine, beer, and other fine foods and beverages. In brief, SyncDev allows us to iteratively test our theories about the customer, their challenges, and our features, to make sure we’re building a great product that people want and need.

Solve Problems

Great products solve real problems right now.

The first phase of Clinks solves the problem of keeping track of what wines and beers you drink and like, and remembering that the next time you’re at the store.

Be Focused

Great products only do a few things, but do them very well.

While we see lots of wine-related digital products with search, pairing, and cellar management features, we wanted to focus first on journaling. Those other features are important, we just felt that remembering is the first key to better experiences.

Be Solid

Great products inspire confidence.

The early nature of the iPhone platform and the iTunes App Store, the hyper-truncated release cycles and low price points, means that developers have few options for testing their software before release, particularly with their target customers.

Here at Clinks, we are nurturing a growing beta test community, stress test our releases, and treat crashing, data, and memory issues with the highest priority. While there are always minor issues to be addressed, we think you’ll appreciate a rock solid experience from day one.

Be Responsive

Great products feel nimble.

Here at Clinks, we continuously evaluate the performance of our software, both on simulators as well as real-world devices, with ever increasing amounts of data. We are always optimizing computational and data access algorithms, pushing logic and flow into separate threads, and adding UI that provides the right amount of feedback. We use our products too, so its not good enough for you until it feels great to us.

Be Delightful

Great products make you smile thru attention to details.

Sometimes the smallest detail can make a big difference. Here at Clinks, we think the details are what make wine and beer so enjoyable, and our software should follow suit.

Ship early and often

Great products keep getting better and better.

By continuing to strive for focused, solid, responsive, and delightful releases, Clinks can iterate quickly to solve more and more challenges around wine and beer.