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Rate my iPhone app: cooking recipes as Gantt charts. Tell me what you think.

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Re: Rate my iPhone app: cooking recipes as Gantt charts. Tell me what you think.

#31

Post by roel_v »

jerguismi wrote: post #28
roel_v wrote: post #20

Awesome, I've been wanting someone to make this for years, and I even drew up some specs to make this myself. It's in principle quite similar to http://www.cookingforengineers.com/ . But the make or break deal on this is going to be the online recipe collection / organizing application, so that you can plan meals on the website, upload the shopping list to a shopping app (or make it so that another app can download i…

Yeah, you can't add more recipes as a user. At the current state it's just a minimum viable product, but I guess we will be developing the app furiously further. Android version will be coming, but one of the difficulties is that I won't be able to sell android applications from Finland.

It won't be painless, but you could sell registration keys through your website and have the user enter them in the app.

Either way I'm really looking forward to this, please keep us posted! If you could partner with a high-quality recipe website, this could be a killer app (there are thousands of recipe websites but most of them just have 1-paragraph braindumps, very hard to follow. It's going to be a major challenge to find a way to let users input the 'steps' of a recipe, including which tasks are parallel etc. There certainly won't be a way to do this automatically in software, each recipe will have to be 'converted' manually).

I'm willing to contribute recipe instructions, even if it means I have to hand-edit xml or yaml or whatever :)

Re: Rate my iPhone app: cooking recipes as Gantt charts. Tell me what you think.

#33

Post by DrJokepu »

What I was always missing from recipe apps/sites/etc for amateurs is "what if something goes wrong" intructions. Maybe it's just me who's too unexperienced or simply incompetent but I reguralry make mistakes such as undercooking the potatoes, forget to salt something, things like that. Obviously, an experienced chef usually has a few ideas how to sort out such issues. I think if this chart app had such "failback measure hints", that would be great.

Re: Rate my iPhone app: cooking recipes as Gantt charts. Tell me what you think.

#34

Post by jerguismi »

king_jester wrote: post #22
rossj wrote: post #2

For those of us that end up making notes whilst trying to work out the timings for meals - this is genius and will save me lots of time. If I still had an iPhone I'd be all over this, but... 22 recipes doesn't seem like a lot - a way for users to submit their own recipes (webapp?) for use with the app would be fantastic.

A feature to add/edit your own recipes in the software would make this killer. Most recipes I cook come from books, so this app has limited use to me without the ability to bring the things I like to make into it. Also, I had to borrow someone's iPhone to check this out. Having a demo video on the site might help to get an idea of how it works for those that don't have access to an iPhone.

> A feature to add/edit your own recipes in the software would make this killer.

This was in my mind since the start, but we just wanted to get something out quickly to see how people like the idea. As reception seems pretty positive, I'll be working hard to develop the app further.

Re: Rate my iPhone app: cooking recipes as Gantt charts. Tell me what you think.

#35

Post by franck »

I think the idea is fantastic and your design is lovely.

Just one bit of criticism : I think you really could use a better logo on the website. It's quite hard to read and seems a bit uninspired compared to the awesome app design.

I wish you success with this great idea and execution.

Re: Rate my iPhone app: cooking recipes as Gantt charts. Tell me what you think.

#37

Post by NEPatriot »

I think the design is clean and simple. As soon as I saw it it just clicked and made sense... leading to the thought 'why aren't all recipes presented like this?'

I would think about allowing users to "import" recipes that would turn them into one of your diagrams. Such that any cooking site out there could embed your diagrams into it.

Re: Rate my iPhone app: cooking recipes as Gantt charts. Tell me what you think.

#40

Post by xutopia »

I love the design touches. I love the way you present the timeline. 3 independent timers is a great ideas that way I can set more than one for various activities in my kitchen (and burn less food).

Things I would improve:

1) I can't believe I cannot add my own recipes on there. I thought I'd be able to add my recipes and send my friends an email with an image attachment akin to what you guys designed. Or a web app attached to it. 2) I'd go full screen (hide top bar when displaying recipe image). 3) I'd rotate the display of the recipe itself or offer the ability to rotate it. 3) The timers are difficult to use. I find myself scrolling up/down instead of sideways. Honestly there isn't a need for more than one screen to display all three timers. 4) the number display gets wonky past 99 minutes. I cook a lot using sous-vide and cooking times often exceed 3-4 hours. [screenshot](http://img.skitch.com/20100902-jc1b8tjam53ru1qeps5u18gy4u.jp...) 5) I like the audio used for when the timer is finished but if I'm making loud noises in the kitchen I might miss it because it is too short. Any chance you could make it loop every few seconds?

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