User Guide

Logging a meal

Tap Log a meal when your food arrives (or after — whenever suits you). The flow is built to finish before your coffee cools:

1. Restaurant match. The app takes a quick location fix and matches the nearest restaurant you've already saved (within about 75 m). If nothing matches, it asks "New place?" and prefills the city using your device's on-device geocoder. You can always enter or correct the name and city manually.
2. Add dishes. One or more dishes per visit. Each dish can carry an optional price and notes.
3. Tag the diner. Optionally tag who at the table ordered the dish. Diner names autocomplete from previous visits, so "Sam" is one tap after the first time.
4. Rate it. Two 1–5 ratings per dish: satisfaction (was it good?) and enjoyment (did you love eating it?). They're separate on purpose — a technically perfect dish you wouldn't reorder deserves different marks than a messy burger you think about weekly.

Dish photos

Every dish can carry a photo. In the dish editor, tap the photo button to take a picture or pick one from your gallery. The photo shows as a thumbnail on the dish card everywhere it appears — tap it for a full-screen view with pinch-to-zoom.

• Photos are stored inside the app, on your device, like everything else.
• Replacing or removing a photo — or deleting the dish or visit — cleans up the stored file too.
• Photos ride along when you share a visit and are included in Premium backups.

Scanning a receipt Premium

The fastest way to log a big table: in the log-meal flow, tap Scan receipt and point the camera at the bill (or pick a photo of it). On-device text recognition reads it and proposes dishes with names and prices. Scanning is a Premium subscriber feature.

1. Scan. Camera or gallery — the receipt image is used once and never stored. On Android, an automatic document scanner crops and deskews the shot for you.
2. Review. A checklist shows what was found, with obvious noise (totals, tax, payment lines) already filtered out. Tick the items that are actually dishes.
3. Edit. Kept items become normal editable dish drafts — fix names, add diners and ratings, then save. Nothing is ever auto-saved.

Scanning a menu Premium

Scan a restaurant's menu once and Table Encore remembers it for that place. In the log-meal flow, pick the restaurant and tap Scan menu:

1. Scan. Same capture flow as receipts — camera or gallery, processed on-device, image never stored.
2. Review. Tick the real dishes in the "Found on the menu" checklist; prices come along where the menu lists them.
3. Autocomplete forever. The kept items are saved as that restaurant's menu. From then on, dish names autocomplete as you type when logging a meal there — prices prefilled.

Re-scanning a menu updates the saved list, so a seasonal menu change is one scan away.

The Here screen

This is the whole point of the app. Standing in a restaurant you've logged before? Open Here and your last visit is already on screen:

• Every dish from your last visit, with both ratings
• Grouped per diner, so you can see what each person had
• Your notes — "ask for extra sauce", "skip the special"

Zero taps, zero searching. Read it while the server hands out menus.

This City

This City lists every restaurant you've saved in the city you're currently in, each with its last-visit date and your best and worst dish there. It turns "where should we eat tonight?" into a scroll through your own greatest hits.

History & sharing a visit

History is the full journal: browse or search every visit you've logged. From any visit you can:

• Edit dishes, ratings, prices, and notes
• Delete a visit entirely
• Share the visit — tap the share icon in the visit's app bar to send it anywhere (messages, email, notes). The share mirrors the Here screen: dishes grouped per diner with star ratings, and any dish photos attached.

Exporting your data

Your journal is yours to take. Open About → Export data and the app shares a complete JSON dump of everything you've recorded — restaurants, visits, dishes, ratings, notes — via the system share sheet. Save it to your files, email it to yourself, whatever you like.

Backup & sync (Premium)

With a Premium subscription, About → Backup & sync backs your whole journal up to a private, app-specific folder in your own Google Drive — dish photos included. Code Cowboys runs no servers; the backup travels straight from your phone to your Drive, and the app can't see anything else in your Drive account.

1. Subscribe to Premium (handled by Google Play or the App Store).
2. Sign in with the Google account whose Drive should hold the backup.
3. Back up whenever you like, and Restore on this or a new phone — restore replaces the journal on the device after a confirmation.

Free tier, Unlimited & Premium

Table Encore is free for up to 5 saved restaurants — photos, sharing, and export included. A "2 of 5 free restaurants used" counter on the Here, This City, and log-meal screens always shows where you stand. Two optional purchases exist:

• Unlimited — a one-time unlock that removes the restaurant limit forever. No subscription.
• Premium — an annual subscription that adds menu & receipt scanning and Backup & sync to your own cloud — and includes Unlimited, so you never need both.

• Your existing data is never gated: viewing, editing, and logging visits at already-saved places stay free forever.
• Only adding restaurant #6 asks for the unlock.
• Payment is handled entirely by Google Play or the App Store; we never see your payment details.

If you enjoy the app, there's also a small coffee tip jar in the settings. It buys nothing and changes nothing — it's just appreciated.

Questions this guide didn't answer? Check the FAQ or the Help & Troubleshooting page.