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It’s almost here.
We are thrilled to announce that we are now accepting signups for Tea 2.0 beta. We won’t be announcing features today, but if you’d like to help us test it, we invite you to sign up here.
PS: Spots are limited! Selected testers will be notified within 48 hours.
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We’re pleased to announce that Tea 1.23 is now available in the App Store.
Changes:
Tea 1.23 comes amidst a larger set of changes that we can’t wait to tell you about. Stay tuned.
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Happy New Year, Tea users!
We have a quick favor to ask of some of our European and Asian users. We would like to improve the quality of our App Store screenshots by using screenshots from actual Tea users. If you would be willing to help out, all we would need is a shot of your tea collection and of your History screen. You can shoot them over to sam at teaapp dot com. As always, we thank you very much for your help.
2012 is going to be a great year, and we’ve got some incredible stuff in the pipeline that we’ve been working on. Stay tuned.
—SI
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The excellent teas my friend Michael brought back from Japan this summer have gotten some terrific discounts over at Chicago Tea Garden.
Kanbayashi’s Houjicha is a steal at $15 for 100g. Highly recommended.
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Tea 1.2 is now available in the App Store. It comes with some fantastic new features:
We aren’t resting on our laurels. We have many, many more features in the pipeline. Stay tuned.
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We’ve recently been featured in two wonderful design blogs.
Oliver Ames, Well Designed Apps:
I followed the progress and development of this app for a while and it even got into one of my favorite apps of 2011…. the design of this app is insanely thoughtful.
And today, Chaitanya Adgaonkar, Beautiful Pixels:
After you finish brewing a cup and return to the main screen, a small ’1′ leaves the cup denoting depletion of stock. It’s one of those small things that will make you smile.
Design is at the heart of what we strive to provide: an engaging experience that is both delightful and surprising. We not only want our app to look great, we want it to feel great also.
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My friend Michael, on his recent trip to Japan:
My destination was Uji, a small town just outside of Kyoto city. Uji, though home to the birthplace of Japanese tea , produces just a small minority of Japanese tea. Uji-cha, as it’s called, is widely considered to be the highest quality Japanese tea available. I sought out teas that had the best taste, in small lots, from multi-generation family artisans.
Michael has partnered with Chicago Tea Garden to make available four teas that he purchased on his trip (all of them pre-earthquake, if that is a concern you have): Kanbayashi’s Sencha, Kanbayashi’s Houjicha, Hattori-san’s Kabuse Sencha, and Hattori-san’s Gyokuro.
I’ve tried all four and personally enjoyed the Gyokuro and Houjicha the most (and thus recommend those the highest) but the Senchas are very good as well.
—S.I.
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Provided by Shanghai tea master Sun Yuping, some of these these are less obvious than others, but here are the few that I fixed on:
4. Water temperature affects the taste
Anybody who has brewed a bitter cup of green tea has probably brewed it with boiling water. What’s more, this disregard for temperature is responsible for bad tasting tea at popular cafes such as Starbucks and even the most premium coffee shops. A bad side effect of using water that’s too hot is often that customers wait five or more minutes for it to cool before removing the bag, which also oversteeps it. It’s a chain reaction of bad news. We try to help with this in Tea by providing temperature suggestions automatically based on the name and type users enter for their teas.
5. Kung fu tea is for real tea lovers:
Its art lies in that it’s a combination of the right amount of tea leaves, high water temperature, particular brewing time and special tea utensils…
While I’m not of the mind that “kung fu” (or Gongfu) style is what “real tea lovers” drink, I wholeheartedly agree that finding the right combination of tea, temperature, and time is the key to unlock good tea—and that’s what Tea is all about helping tea drinkers do.
—SI
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By now it seems quite clear that Apple has decided to pass over its 10-year retail anniversary in silence rather than with fanfare. Reports over the last week of an unusual Sunday meeting of Apple retail employees sparked a steady swelling of speculation, ranging from imminent product release (a 10-year commemorative iPod?) to mystery bag giveaways. Neither happened. Instead, what came of Sunday’s meeting was a worldwide implementation of a major revamp of how information is displayed next to products—a curious repurposing of iPad to assist in selling the entire core hardware line.
Why is Apple retail staying mum on turning 10? A more apt question might be, why should companies celebrate their age? American brands seem to have a near obsession with prominently displaying founding dates and making much ado about turning ages multiple of 5. We’ve all seen the signs: “Celebrating excellence since 1987!”, “50 Years of Quality, and Counting!”, etc, etc.
A couple of weeks ago, in fact, I happened upon downtown Atlanta when all of Centennial Olympic Park was being rented out by The Coca Cola Company to host a special employees only 125th year anniversary bash, replete with such dazzling musical guests as Kelly Clarkson and Ryan Seacrest: new selling old. In the world of soft drinks, timelessness is cherished, and nostalgia is often leveraged as a marketing tool by such companies as Coca-Cola to maintain interest over a customer’s lifetime—Coke is the same product, after all, that it’s always been, and that’s the point.
However, nostalgia has no place in a competitive landscape that thrives on change. Over in Silicon Valley, only losers yearn for the past—usually a past sans the new, younger, leaner competitor that’s changing the landscape. It’s abundantly obvious at this point that Apple is not interested in bragging about getting old, because the painful truth is that in the world of high technology, age is a disadvantage and nothing in itself to celebrate. Turning a milestone age at best can be used as a moment to pause and reflect on one’s traditions and core values, and all of this in the service of forward motion. No party required.
It brings to mind what one of my most admired leaders, Coach Mike Krzyzewski, calls the “next play” philosophy (taken from Beyond Basketball):
The ‘next play’ philosophy emphasizes the fact that the most important play of the game or the life moment on which you should always focus is the next one. It is not about the turnover I committed last time down the court. It’s not even about the three pointer I just hit to tie the game. It is about what’s next. To waste time lamenting a mistake or even celebrating a success is distracting, and can leave you and your team unprepared for that which you are about to face.
Telling is an in-store memo purportedly released to employees yesterday, titled, “What’s so special about yesterday?”:
Our 10-year history is something to be proud of. But at the same time, it’s just so, well, yesterday…We’re not content to rest on our yesterdays. We’ll continue to move forward. To make the most of tomorrow. And every day after that.
Sometimes it might be difficult to grasp just how novel it is for an American corporation to pass up the opportunity to market age, but Apple knows better than anyone that with over half of its revenues coming from a product that wasn’t even out four years ago, they’ve got to stay fresh, and that’s an ideal that is fundamentally at odds with getting carried away with reflecting on one’s longevity. It’s very striking to imagine an Apple (or Google, or Microsoft) making it to the ripe old age of 50, but something tells me that if the company ethos maintains its relentless penchant for reinvention, we won’t see a single product or marketing campaign premised on that half century marker.
In spite of any prior success, the score is always zero-to-zero, at best.
—SI
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Handmade Tea founder Caleb Brown talks about how Tea has helped him experiment with different herbal blends:
I’ve been blending with cocao nibs, juniper berries, and cloves a good bit recently. As I’ve mentioned in a previous blog post, I traditionally try blend ingredients solo, just the ingredient and hot water. Then when I understand their individual flavor profiles, I start to combine them in a way I think they’ll harmonize nicely. So I use Tea for iPhone to add them individually as ‘herbal infusions’ as well as together in a more mature blend.
This is why we made Tea: to finally give tea lovers a fun and simple way to experiment with different preparation methods.
You can tell this app was truly made for tea lovers, by tea lovers.
