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

kangasbros.fi

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

#41

Post by xutopia »

DrJokepu wrote: post #33

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 meas…

That's what Aardvark is for. Ask your cooking questions on there and chances are I'll be the one answering you ;-)

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

#42

Post by jsolson »

jerguismi wrote: post #17
briancooley wrote: post #12

You should tailor this for the iPad, particularly in portrait mode. I very often follow Epicurious recipes on my iPad by standing it in the dock. The big difficulty is trying to read and parse the cooking instructions into a workflow. This could reduce that pain.

Guess we are making iPad version as soon as possible :)

Be warned: going universal is a bigger job than you expect it to be, regardless of how complicated you expect it to be. We did this recently with Folio+. It turned out to take us about four times as long as we were expecting to produce a port that we're still not thrilled with. The basic problem is trying to make your UI feel self-consistent and platform-consistent, as the two frequently end up playing against each other. It's probably easier to go from iPhone->iPad (we went the other way), but you can't just expect to flatten a few things out into UISplitViewControllers and have everything look great.

Doing it over again, I'd have focussed on our core product for iPad for longer rather than immediately trying to go universal. It makes every feature we add from here on out a much larger QA headache, and hasn't been worth it in terms of gaining access to the much larger market of iPhone users.

+ Shameless plug: http://ballisticpigeon.com/folio

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

#43

Post by Tyrannosaurs »

swalberg wrote: post #25
Tyrannosaurs wrote: post #21

I think it looks fantastic but I'm not sure it's not a bit style over substance. What you really need is the critical path mapped out rather than multiple tasks in parallel. People generally cook doing one thing at a time - prep this, chop this, add to pan, now chop this so on and so forth. For a nervous cook I can see this being slightly confusing, or at least a non-optimal presentation of the information. For an ex…

I'm going to go out on a limb and say this app doesn't target experienced cooks. I classify myself as one of those and would agree, a lot of this is (beautiful) noise. Some recipes won't translate well either. But for people who are not at all adventurous in the kitchen, I think this is a great way to get them into cooking more than just hamburgers and frozen pizza. Consider a recipe like chicken cacciatore. It's eas…

I agree that it's not for experienced cooks but I think an inexperienced cook wants what to do step by step where this sets things out in parallel.

If you start down one arrow with this you're going to find yourself getting to a point where you're expected to have done a bunch of other things. It's a good overview of the whole process but I'm not sure it helps the person going "what do I do next?"

Maybe there could be two views - the flow chart which is the overview as many people want to know where they're heading before they start out and how it all links up, and a step by step which guides people through it in the order they'd do things?

I'm not saying I don't like the idea, I just think it needs a bit of work.

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

#44

Post by andymoe »

Is that your actual site for this app because it's one big giant image and it's really painful to download for the first time even on my fast cable connection. It's 795 KB... That's way too big for a single page website. You might want to double check you at least compressed the image properly. Ditch the png and use a jpeg if you have to. I got it down to 188KB on my first try compressing it to a jpeg.

I like the idea and look forward to taking the app for a spin. What should I cook first?

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

#45

Post by jerguismi »

andymoe wrote: post #44

Is that your actual site for this app because it's one big giant image and it's really painful to download for the first time even on my fast cable connection. It's 795 KB... That's way too big for a single page website. You might want to double check you at least compressed the image properly. Ditch the png and use a jpeg if you have to. I got it down to 188KB on my first try compressing it to a jpeg. I like the ide…

Thank you for noticing that, I changed the image to 140kb jpg.

I recommend feta cheese soup, if you want something with beef with in it then bratwurst pasta :)

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

#46

Post by jerguismi »

bemmu wrote: post #36

Nice to see some apps coming from Finland. Is there an app developer scene here that I'm unaware of?

At least the qvik.fi guys are developing iPhone/iPad apps.

I have met other iPhone developers now and then, but it's not very easy line of business. I do web development mostly, and try to make iPhone apps when I have time/money for it.

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

#48

Post by wallflower »

jerguismi wrote: post #26
wallflower wrote: post #19

Love your graphic style. Very cute, reminds me of Saturday morning cartoons. Warm, fuzzy feeling. However, the icon is a little too cluttered and does not represent your app well in a first-impression sense. How are you representing the critical path? Some minor issues. 1) Since the Food Gantt chart is displayed landscape, not intuitive that you have to swipe left to go back to the main recipe list. 2) If you are scr…

Thanks for the suggestions! We haven't though much about how to evolve this thing further, gotta think it through before i start implementing things.

Congrats on implementing the Minimum Viable Product!

Care to share any rough details of how long it took to ship the MVP?

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

#49

Post by andymoe »

jerguismi wrote: post #45
andymoe wrote: post #44

Is that your actual site for this app because it's one big giant image and it's really painful to download for the first time even on my fast cable connection. It's 795 KB... That's way too big for a single page website. You might want to double check you at least compressed the image properly. Ditch the png and use a jpeg if you have to. I got it down to 188KB on my first try compressing it to a jpeg. I like the ide…

Thank you for noticing that, I changed the image to 140kb jpg. I recommend feta cheese soup, if you want something with beef with in it then bratwurst pasta :)

I think I'll try the feta soup!

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

#50

Post by moxiemk1 »

briancooley wrote: post #12

You should tailor this for the iPad, particularly in portrait mode. I very often follow Epicurious recipes on my iPad by standing it in the dock. The big difficulty is trying to read and parse the cooking instructions into a workflow. This could reduce that pain.

>> You should tailor this for the iPad

Indeed. I'm probably never going to use a recipe app on my iPhone - its too small and hard to look at when I put it down on the table while my hands are dirty.

iPad, on the other hand, would be excellent.

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