On Beanhunter's demise

After years of putting it off, I finally turned Kana Bento into an iOS app. It doesn’t bring in much money, but it now covers my hosting costs – if I conveniently ignore the hours it took to write my first iOS app. Sorry, Android users, but I’m staying clear of that for a while yet!

So far I’ve built one for the Japanese alphabets, Hiragana and Katakana, and have another waiting for iOS approval that covers Korean Hangul. I’m thinking about Cyrillic next, but I might hold off – there’s an idea I’ve had in my head for years that I just can’t let go of.

There used to be a site called Beanhunter. It was like Google Maps, but specifically for coffee. Whenever I was in a new area, I’d use it to find good coffee, and it worked like a charm. But the app died years ago and doesn’t seem to be coming back – it looks like Google Maps killed it off. And Google Maps just isn’t good enough for me.

Don’t get me wrong, Google Maps is great – just not for finding coffee. You’re stuck with cafe reviews, which sounds reasonable, and is for most people. But I’m a coffee snob. I want to know about the coffee, not the avocado toast.

I want to know the beans a place uses, the brand of coffee machine, the coffee types and brew methods on offer, the varieties of milk. And then, maybe, about the avocado toast.

So I’m going to build an app. I might be the only person who ever uses it, but it’ll make me feel better. More news to come!

Final note after I noticed how many em dashes I used here. This was not AI written. I liked using em dashes before AI decided it was cool, and I’ll bloody well keep using them!