Keeping and reviewing your Bee Health Guru scans - just take a screenshot

[MontanaProf]

The pre-release Kickstarter version is our Community version of the Bee Health Guru and does not provide the ability to view the reports once they are sent. The best way to view these reports later is to just take a screenshot of them. Most phones provide pretty simple two-button-push functionality to achieve that. When I scanned our 18 colonies I took a photo of each box first (they are labeled), used the Bee Health Guru to listen to the bees and then allowed our AI to perform its analysis, and simply took a screenshot of the report. I had a nice set of 36 photos to show the colony and report, colony and report, and so on, when I was done.


Providing the ability to review scans/reports is being built into our Pro version. That capability requires quite a bit of programming, a good deal of backend database configuration, and more importantly a lot more buttons and functionality on the phone app which makes it more complex to use. Our goal was to first make an app that was broadly usable by beekeepers. With a team who has been working with beekeepers for over 30 years, and continues to work with commercial beekeepers, we recognized that more functionality would be required by those with more than a few colonies.

[yellowcyclist]

Ha release came while I’m on holiday. Download and bath top test both ran OK. Live test will have to wait a week. Good tip about photos of report and hive

[Reto]

I am not a programmer and very likely to over-simplify this. The way I understand it, the app offers the ability to take samples without any connection to the Internet and the claim is, the data can be uploaded later, once an Internet connection is available. That means the data must be stored somewhere, somehow on the phone, as no back-end database is available without Internet connection (as I understand it). For Android phones that is probably the "root" area, which is not usually accessible to regular users. However it is there. I wonder what makes it so hard to show it to the users (other than the prospect of monetisation)?

[MontanaProf]

Reto, you're largely correct about how the Bee Health Guru app works. What you're missing here is just because data is accessible doesn't mean that it is easy to show to the user. Adding the functionality of showing the results of scans would require quite a bit of programming, but much more importantly, a lot screen real-estate. We'd have to have functionality as to which scans you want to see, and functionality to move between scans. We would also need to delete scans at some point, otherwise your phone would fill up. When does this happen, and how do we let a user know, and which scans should a user delete, and how do we get a user to choose between scans that they want to delete or keep?
I teach systems analysis & design, and one thing I cover that is critically important is to keep the design as simple as possible. That almost certainly means leaving functionality out that advanced users might want.