Beanstack Tracker

Our library is using Beanstack for their summer reading program since the building is physically closed due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Our entire family is participating. We decided rather than have all four of us have our own account, we would create one account and have four “readers” in the account. What is frustrating is that the app doesn’t let you add a “default” person to your device. For example, every time I open the app, my 13-year-old’s “profile” loads rather than my own, creating the unfortunate opportunity for me to add my books, reading minutes, or completed Activities to his “reader account” rather than mine. At the same time, my 16-year-old’s iPhone, opens to MY account rather than his, and my wife’s iPhone opens to my 16-year-old’s. So it would be nice if Beanstack could add an option to set a default user, or at the very minimum open the app to the last reader account that was previously opened. Also, I wish you could edit previously added books. For instance, I tried adding a book by scanning the ISBN. However, it wouldn’t scan, so I added it manually. Later, when I discovered I was scanning the book incorrectly, I wanted to redo it, but that would have required me to delete the book and re-add it, thus losing my minutes and pages read.

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We have been using the Beanstack app along with the Badge Book. Mostly everything works great. But there are 2 problems! One, if we read in the late evening it assigns the following date to the reading. For example we read from 10:20-11:00 PM on May 30th and when I select done it records that we read from 10:20-11:00 on May 31st. I don’t know exactly when the cutoff is for it to log reading as the next day but this messes up our challenges for badges. And if the app knows the time how come it doesn’t know the date? Two, the last day of each month (last day of challenges) don’t count for the challenges. So we read for 40 minutes from 10:20-11:00 on May 30th. It logs it as May 31st (see issue one) and doesn’t count it as reading towards May’s Challenges. It is 1:30 am on May 31st and we don’t have access to continue to work on May challenges or to complete any of May Challenges activities. If I tried to go into any activities for any challenges dated May 1st-31st it won’t load them. They show as grey lines. This happened for April as well.

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The most obvious feature does not exist. It was perplexing to try to add new books I just picked up from the library before sitting down to read them with the kiddos. Essentially one is stuck picking a start date or the default today is entered. As for the books we read and forgot to scan we have to go through the same process then back date each book it is almost not worth it. I decided to write them down and found it was faster and can take the list to the library to show the same process. They laughed too. All the parts are here in the app just add a button for scan ISBN then add to library of books. Then at least the book is available when the kids pick it out of the stack to read it. Additional add a calendar view to add book I read this week for quick logging. I am not doing this for badges as much as teaching my daughters to keep notes on their progress for themselves. Feel free to contact me directly for detailed feedback if you are the developer I am happy to help. So much for feedback the new version is horrible, the user interface is so limited. Most of all the product design team clearly does not use the app everyday and night we have just about given up... tonight we have to re-Enter every book because they do not show up in the recent list... what a complete let down the new version misses he most obvious fixes.

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I’m enjoying using this app to track my baby twins’ reading, but I’d love to see it improve a bit more. I’d like to have more books be able to be scanned by the ISBN, as it takes some time to type the title and photograph the book (and then that still doesn’t connect the ISBN to that book in the future, so you have to either re-enter the book or find it in past books read!). Also, I’d love to just easily be able to enter an estimate of total minutes read during a session instead of entering minutes per book. Honestly, the whole app could benefit from quicker (1-2 screen) entries - the quicker the better, especially for parents of very young readers who have lots of small, shorter books that are being read (and not a lot of extra time with said little ones)!! And I’d love to be able to easily view the total number of books read per child on some sort of home screen.

Love that my library is using an app now for books tracking! Love the barcode scanner too. Updates are needed: if a book has a reading log, we need the option to hit a checkmark or swipe to say it’s completed. Example: My library did a program by pages in the summer, so we didn’t mark any books as completed since we were re-reading a lot. Now we are doing a program with lifetime books completed and I have to enter a new log to have the option to mark a title as completed. Also: you have to tap in the exact right spot to add text, it’s not intuitively the whole line or the title for logging past readings. That’s frustrating. I feel like there are lots more ways to make it easier to log and edit. Every log should be able to count for pages or time or books completed vs picking one and that log can only be used that way. Etc. keep working on it! Love the concept!!