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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.

#51

Post by jasonlotito »

Tyrannosaurs wrote: post #43
swalberg wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 b…

Have to agree with this thread. Interesting idea, still needs actual work. Inexperienced cooks will be all over the place. Experienced cooks will be frustrated with the limitations.

As an experience cook myself, I'm frustrated just by looking at the screenshots.

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

#52

Post by tibbon »

roel_v wrote: post #31
jerguismi wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 challeng…

Or they could do microtransactions in the app to sell more content as well. Then Apple takes care of the billing.

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

#54

Post by joeld42 »

This looks great. I cook a lot with my iPhone (just in the browser). My suggestions, with the caveat that I haven't actually tried your app yet.

- Make sure there's a way to disable the "sleep/screensaver" mode. This is my biggest annoyance.

- I couldn't tell what the "milk" icon was supposed to be. Maybe show a glass of milk instead?

- Most importantly, instead of showing the ingredients as icons, show them as "before/after" each step. Preferably with photos, not illustrations. For example, you say "potatoes: peel and slice". In my experience, a novice cook would say, "how thin? do you want them lengthwise or what?", etc.. same thing with "finely chop garlic", "cut off the dark green part of the leeks?", and especially "boil until thickened and bubbly", etc... what beginning cooks what is "make it look like THIS (with a picture).

- I LOVE the kitchen timers. Maybe make that a separate app?

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

#55

Post by city41 »

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 :)

Absolutely. If you make this for the iPad I will buy it day one. You can even get away with raising the price a couple bucks on the iPad but still essentially have the same functionality.

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

#57

Post by showerst »

Great idea, as a side note, I notice that all of the website text is just in an image, which means that there's nothing for search engines to pick up on.

I'd strongly recommend that you put up a paragraph or two of real (non-image) text into that page somewhere, or at least add a decent description tag.

Googling for your app shows no text at all in the hit, and having no indexable page content really limits what searches you'll show up for.

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

#58

Post by gojomo »

Though i'm not much of a cook, this seems like an awesome idea. Three initial thoughts:

- Readability is critical, but current font/contrast choices don't yet seem optimal (on site or in screenshots)

- Voice control for scrolling could be a giant win -- cooks' hand are messy! (Similarly, a voice-synthesizer reading the recipe on request, with tivo-like voice controls, would be cool.)

- iPad!

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