WSTA Trade Diary
88 out of 100
Published Wednesday, February 8, 2012
Overview
The WSTA trade diary is a simple android app, which is a must for anyone involved in the wine trade in the UK. The trade diary shows all the trade tastings going on in the UK on a particular date. Most of the tastings are free to the trade but some are by invitation only. It also has a listing of seminars, exams and awards.
The displays are particularly simple. When you start the app. after the initial splash screen it goes to month view similar to many calendars.
From here you can move to another month or select a particular date.
You can tell the days that have tastings as these have a blue dot. Below the calendar you can scroll to see brief details of the event. Clicking on the brief description brings up the event in details including times, location and general information.
A neat feature for Google users is a Sync Event button that lets you add the event to your Google calendar automatically. This saves time and effort. But perhaps the coolest feature is a map showing all the events on in the UK. It allows you to plan your trip, but also sees any other events nearby that you may want to drop into. There is a small bug in the map. If you change the date it does not re-load the new dates and tasting locations until you re-size the map, but apart from that it makes a useful feature.
You can also submit events to WSTA through the app. Although I would still do this on a computer as my typing on the phone is slow and there is no spell checker, an essential tool for me.
While this is a review of the android app the iphone app. has been released, but there is no news or information on the windows phone 7 environments. What would help these users is if WSTA made the dates available as a iclander for Google or Outlooks CSV file format.
The WSTA android app. is a simple app but it does what it says on the tin. The value is in the dates, and having them easily added to your phones calendar is a bonus.
I rate this app 88 out of 100.
