All for the Saving of One or Two Clicks

It may seem a bit redundant, given the number of wallet like loyalty card applications freely available on the Google Play store, but I’ve made myself a members discount card app for one of my local pubs.  This combined with my phones Android Pay (pay pass/pay wave built into the phone) capability means I can buy my discounted beer without fumbling with my wallet.  All done by waving my phone.

BeerBrass Features

Answers to the big questions real quick:

  • Why?
     I was waiting for someone to drop some hardware off to my house and, knowing his 10 mins means about 4 hours, I thought I’d look at the Android SDK.  Honestly, I had the initial version knocked up in about that time and then messed with the artwork for a day or 2.  But I could knock another one up in about 45 mins now.
  • Other apps exist that hold more than one card.
    Yup, but mine is a single click from the home screen.  No clicking to open an app then swiping to find my card etc. So….yup, I made this because more than 1 click is too many clicks for me.
  • What are you expecting from this?
    Bugger all.  Although it’s been less than a week and I’ve already been asked by 2 separate parties about building a similar (but with more features) app for their purposes.  So that’s nice.  Everyone loves extra cash in their pocket 😛
  • Why upload it to Google Play?
    Just to see how the system works.  Everyone else was doing it, so why not give it a shot?  I do well with peer pressure.
  • Why the parody of BearBrass?
    Mostly copyright concerns.  I just want to publish to the Google Play Store to get a handle on it all.  The agreements involved are pretty brutal regarding copyright. It also serves to highlight that it’s not an official app from BearBrass. I kept the branded artwork just in case they liked it anyway.  :P. If the owners/managers don’t like it, I can strip it back further, remove it, or…they could just not allow people to use it at the bar.

BetaBrass - Testers Wanted

Until it all goes wrong, I’m beta testing it with various devices.  The skewing of the bar code or over stretching for various displays can cause problems for the reader at the cash register, so I’ve hit up my facebook friends for volunteers to give it a test run on their various devices.

General Rant

This isn’t an innovative app, I know.  You could achieve the same thing by creating a shortcut to a photo of your bar card on the home screen.  In this case, you are prompted for your member card number on first boot and your barcode is generated by the application for you.  The only reason this happened is that I I wanted to test drive the Android SDK.  This app popped into my head as easy.  I also lost my old Bear Brass card 2 weeks back and figured it would be convenient to have the digital version.

I don’t intend to sell the app, just upload it to the Google Play Store as a free download.  If the venue in question wanted to get the branded version up there and save some hassle handing out cards etc. I’d be open to the idea (hint hint, nudge nudge).  Of course any additional features may be interesting to explore too.  I’ve had some cool suggestions already but I don’t want to give any of that away just yet.

Of course the whole thing could go tits up, my developer account could get pulled Bear Brass could refuse to serve me or worse :D.  Let’s just hope that doesn’t happen.  I would like to emphasise that the staff have been extremely good sports and I am super appreciative that they have entertained my shenanigans this far.  If it does go anywhere, I’ll have to include a thanks to each of them on the splash screen at boot.

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