I keep everything in my head. If I forget something, it must've been not so important.
Cellar Spreadsheet
- Thread starter Snook
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I have a cellar spreadsheet that I maintain carefully. Listed are all of my sealed tins and any bulk jars that I haven’t opened. I have an entirely separate set of jars of open tins and bulk that I don’t keep track of at all except that they are organized by genre in different drawers of an old dresser. But with 80+ blends open I routinely forget about stuff, leading to about equal amounts of (1) frustration when I think I had something open but don’t, and (2) delight when I come across something that had slipped my mind years ago. It’s a refreshing mix of exact data and complete chaos.
I used to have a very detailed spreadsheet for cigars, but I rarely am at a computer so I keep everything on my phone. I use the notes app. Everything is alphabetical by brand, then each blend has a brief description, how much I have, how much I paid, where it came from, tasting notes and a basic thumbs up/down rating. It would be nice to know exactly how many pounds I have ( I have a pretty good guess), of which blend types and so on but to plug in all that information I would need a month of free time.
Since this thread is still fresh, the app I made for my phone is nearing completion of version 1.0. I've been hesitant to offer it to others though because I don't want a bunch of grief about it like "why not iPhone" or "why not this feature", etc., and partly because different people track different things and trying to get all possible options would make it bloated and defeat it's ultimate purpose of being quick and easy and simple.
If anyone wants it (free), I can start a thread about it. It'll only available for Android phones running a minimum version of Android 8, and doesn't require permissions or internet access. I'm not a developer and had to self-teach how to make it. It's meant to be quick and simple and easy to update, and I'm not open to suggestions for it. It is what it is. I do have some plans for some expansion, mostly just because it gives me something to do and I have sort-of enjoyed making it.
Proper app development is not as easy as people might think it is and what's even possible is limited due to the style of coding I learned (Compose) being incomplete (but it's what free codelabs existed for me to learn from). For example, only just yesterday did the codebase get updated to fix bugs related to date pickers, and half the API's used are listed as "experimental" and whenever they've updated code, twice it's caused breaking changes in my coding that I had to work-around.
Version 1 just has fields for brand, blend, genre (broad genre designations of just va, burley, English, aro, and other), simple "quantity" (just a whole integer, so figure out if you want it to mean pounds or tins or whatever, or just use only 1 or 0 for tracking in vs out of stock), simple "rating" of either liked or hated or neutral, and a field for keeping notes.
If nothing else, you can look at it as a supplementation to the spreadsheets on your computer. I did make a CSV import for it to make it easy to copy your cellaring data over. Just export the spreadsheet as a CSV, with commas as delimiters and double-quotes (") around values and double-quotes as the escape character if there's options for that, just to guarantee a successful import (I didn't make multiple functions for all the possible CSV formats that are incompatible, just one for standard formats). It can also export the database as a CSV, so if you update it by the phone, you can export and then import that on the computer and track additional stuff.
It'll never be on the Google Play Store because of their ToS related to tobacco, so the APK would have to be downloaded and installed directly.
If anyone wants it (free), I can start a thread about it. It'll only available for Android phones running a minimum version of Android 8, and doesn't require permissions or internet access. I'm not a developer and had to self-teach how to make it. It's meant to be quick and simple and easy to update, and I'm not open to suggestions for it. It is what it is. I do have some plans for some expansion, mostly just because it gives me something to do and I have sort-of enjoyed making it.
Proper app development is not as easy as people might think it is and what's even possible is limited due to the style of coding I learned (Compose) being incomplete (but it's what free codelabs existed for me to learn from). For example, only just yesterday did the codebase get updated to fix bugs related to date pickers, and half the API's used are listed as "experimental" and whenever they've updated code, twice it's caused breaking changes in my coding that I had to work-around.
Version 1 just has fields for brand, blend, genre (broad genre designations of just va, burley, English, aro, and other), simple "quantity" (just a whole integer, so figure out if you want it to mean pounds or tins or whatever, or just use only 1 or 0 for tracking in vs out of stock), simple "rating" of either liked or hated or neutral, and a field for keeping notes.
If nothing else, you can look at it as a supplementation to the spreadsheets on your computer. I did make a CSV import for it to make it easy to copy your cellaring data over. Just export the spreadsheet as a CSV, with commas as delimiters and double-quotes (") around values and double-quotes as the escape character if there's options for that, just to guarantee a successful import (I didn't make multiple functions for all the possible CSV formats that are incompatible, just one for standard formats). It can also export the database as a CSV, so if you update it by the phone, you can export and then import that on the computer and track additional stuff.
It'll never be on the Google Play Store because of their ToS related to tobacco, so the APK would have to be downloaded and installed directly.
The trick is... can you promise to keep this app up to date for the next 30 to 40 years?
the original Pipe Tool app for iPhones was pretty cool, great visuals, easy to use, but then after four or so years the guy who made it stopped. And, all is lost. I refuse to use any app or online tool not made or upkept by an actual company with an investment in it.
Anybody can design and run an app or website. But, can you guarantee that you will be as enthusiastic about keeping it up after ten years? No, no you can't. A company however, can just replace the team keeping up the app when they get slack with it, and they can better guarantee that it will be there after a few decades. And, the whole reason for a cellar is to keep the tobaccos for decades and decades. An app that is only around for five years or so, is pointless.
I don't mean to sound discouraging. It's just a fact of it all. I've been here long enough to know that most enthusiastic pipe smokers quit after a while. I've even seen pipe makers quit smoking altogether. And, even if you don't quit... do you really want to keep up with all of the BS of running an app for free for 20 f'n years, at the very least.
Same, it's just tobacco. Documentation is too job oriented for something I don't put much thought into.
Did you also install racks in your warehouse to store it all?
I maintain a very basic spreadsheet which has served me well. And while I too am in awe of some of these workbooks I’m saddened to see a lack of pivot tables and other charts/graphs!!
You tease (I think) but I did build some custom shelving for closets for my bins.
Nobody can guarantee that, not even a fully-fledged company. Plenty of apps backed by companies die too in 5 years or less. I've seen just as many apps from companies falter as from independents, and seen many independents kept apps going for over 10 years. Half the apps I use on my phone are from independent developers that have kept the apps up-to-date since the Android 2.3 days.
Once it's finished though, keeping up with it is easy. If breaking changes happen to the system software or updates are needed, it's not that bad, maybe a day for one person as long as it's regularly kept-up with. Two days for breaking changes like what happened yesterday with the new Compose BOM and targeting Android 15, there will be an enforcement of "edge-to-edge" stuff. The app being simple, it wouldn't be too difficult, I just have to add padding and inset values to some stuff is all.
I am reasonably certain I'll be a pipe smoker the rest of my life, and reasonably certain I'll have ≈10 years worth of tobacco I want to keep track of, and reasonably certain I don't want to fire up the computer to update stuff, so I am reasonably certain I will upkeep it. It's written in Android native stuff, so even if I wrote it 4 years ago in Android Views, I could have easily migrated it to Android Compose (that's about the only good documentation there is).
I have no job, and am retired. I have no friends and no life, and likely never will because my interests/hobbies are "boring". I love math, I love philosophy, I love problem solving and logic puzzles. Half my free time is spent doing nonograms, watching educational videos of mathematicians like Euler. My dick gets rock hard learning about that old school calculus of Leibniz.
My life is mostly joyless. I had fun figuring out the filtering function in making the app, of creating a tri-state checkbox to stack under the real checkbox just to act as a visual aid for filtering between the mutually exclusive rating values and being able to return one, the other, both or neither, and how to get the fake tristate checkboxes to monitor a state of the selection. Creating the CSV mapping functions. All stuff that's "boring", stuff that doesn't make you friends, that leaves you with "having no life". This is what's "fun" to me.
So yeah, I'm reasonably certain I will keep up with it... what else do I have to do while I wait to die?
I also have all the code in a git repository if anyone that's a developer wanted to port it to Apple/iPhone. It's written almost exclusively in Kotlin, a single-language to have to keep up with, and written with modularity in mind so that the whole thing doesn't break if codebases get new commits and changes, and only individual components need updating.
Half of what I did was setting up for "just in case I do decide to share it" and half the plans I have are for things I could not care less about, but others might want... even though when I made it, I wasn't even sure if I would share it with others, especially after the bs response it got before when I made a post about considering whether to share it I still did stuff with others in mind.
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Just wanted to make sure you knew what you were getting into. Obviously, you have the time. Thought maybe you were one of these flighty kids that picked up APP making in an elective class, ha ha.
People letting their APPs fall to the wayside burned me on using APPs or websites for my cellar. I was just making sure.
Good luck
Nope, I went out of my way to learn and continue to learn coding for the fun of it, not as a career or "side-hustle" or anything like that. It's like one big, long-running, never completable logic puzzle.
Spreadsheets and pipe smoking go together like peanut butter and shit.
Knock it off with all this app talk. I’m getting hungry and it isn’t a cheat day. Fried cheese and wings are for this weekend!
