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Show HN: RecipeWriter – An editor to write recipes

cucumbertown.com

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Re: Show HN: RecipeWriter – An editor to write recipes

#31

Post by pbhjpbhj »

nobodysfool wrote: post #8

No autocomplete for julienne, sautee, carmelize. It seems like this was written without any input from a trained chef. Hint: http://www.d.umn.edu/~alphanu/cookery/glossary_cooking.html

"carmelize"? I've heard US Americans saying it but I just thought it was poor diction for "caramelize" [bleurgh, of course caramelise is the correct spelling ;0) ]. Did you typo it or is this becoming an accepted spelling?

Wonder if you can build in synonyms without making it cluttered: julienne is for _home_ purposes used as equivalent to allumette, or matchsticks, or long thin strips, or batons. In a professional kitchen I think batons|batonnet are fatter, julienne are skinny and long, allumet|matchsticks are as the name suggests but a usually a little thinner.

Standardising recipe descriptions is probably pretty hard.

Re: Show HN: RecipeWriter – An editor to write recipes

#32

Post by pbhjpbhj »

Aside: from the vid, what are "2ons" of onion? I've searched and can't find it on Wikipedia. Google's doing it's thing of not letting me limit SERPs to those with the terms I want (yes even when they're in ""). I found a couple of recipes that mention "X ons" of ingredient but ... is it USA ounces to distinguish from "oz" as imperial ounces?

It's not in the Dummies book, not on Betty Crockers list, not on Wikipedia, not on a list I found on epinions, ...?

This brings to mind, does the recipe auto-convert to metric (eg from cups or imperial). How does it handle that?

Re: Show HN: RecipeWriter – An editor to write recipes

#33

Post by Cherian »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #32

Aside: from the vid, what are "2ons" of onion? I've searched and can't find it on Wikipedia. Google's doing it's thing of not letting me limit SERPs to those with the terms I want (yes even when they're in ""). I found a couple of recipes that mention "X ons" of ingredient but ... is it USA ounces to distinguish from "oz" as imperial ounces? It's not in the Dummies book, not on Betty Crockers list, not on Wikipedia,…

Not sure of this. Can you point me to one?

Re: Show HN: RecipeWriter – An editor to write recipes

#34

Post by anandgrafiti »

bazzargh wrote: post #30
mattbreeden wrote: post #23

Really nice looking editor. I don't cook, but if I was going to use this I would want an option to turn off automatic parsing of the ingredient list (did not check to see if you had that). Also, if it's something you care about, you mis-spelled 'consistency' in your intro video as 'consistecny' on the 1st step of the recipe.

Seconded. The parser is very odd; it turns 'a nice cream' into 'nice cream' but 'an ice cream' is left alone. Moving the sentence structure around doesn't scan right, eg Golden Rings 5 Calling Birds 4 French Hens 3 Turtle Doves 2 partridge in a pear tree it's inconsistent, you have to retype things after correction to get something grammatical: * '2 oz of butter' becomes 'butter 2 oz of'. * '2 rashers of bacon' becom…

Sorry about that, We took a calculated call with the editor. For the consumer, a structured tabular view of ingredients make sense but for the author, the structured way of entering it in tables becomes a chore. This is the main problem with creating good recipes. So we try to hit a sweet spot, and bring up a bit of that desired structure the way we parse the ingredients.

The writer is learning continuously with more people using it, and we correcting the imperfections as we spot them. There is no end to the ways in which people may enter ingredients. Our bet is, once the user get to see how it is presented on the final output, the second time they will start visualising the way it needs to be entered. A bit of mutual learning. Meanwhile, we keep looking for patterns and keep correcting these rough edges.

Also there are tons of use cases that we try to solve here. For instance, people who have recipes stored on their personal Onenote/Evernotes accounts or blogs can simply copy/paste the ingredients and steps to the free form editor.This would not have been possible in a structured form.

http://raymondsfood.cucumbertown.com/ recreated around 100 recipes from his blog over a weekend using the editor! Sure, it could still render buggy, but it is possible to iron out the bugs with more data coming in and patterns detected.

Re: Show HN: RecipeWriter – An editor to write recipes

#36

Post by digitalpbk »

Cherian wrote: post #2

We built this with a lot of feedback and help from the HN community. When Cucumbertown[1] launched we had a lot of HNers like Trey who used to keep recipes in a Dropbox folder and share. The first version of the editor was form based (a bit like a survey form) and inhibited copy/paste and free form cursor movements. We hacked around that version for sometime time till we hit the limits. A textfield could only do so m…

Dev here...

We have tied together parts of https://github.com/daviferreira/medium-editor, vanilla-js and jquery :)

Re: Show HN: RecipeWriter – An editor to write recipes

#37

Post by bazzargh »

anandgrafiti wrote: post #34
bazzargh wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seconded. The parser is very odd; it turns 'a nice cream' into 'nice cream' but 'an ice cream' is left alone. Moving the sentence structure around doesn't scan right, eg Golden Rings 5 Calling Birds 4 French Hens 3 Turtle Doves 2 partridge in a pear tree it's inconsistent, you have to retype things after correction to get something grammatical: * '2 oz of butter' becomes 'butter 2 oz of'. * '2 rashers of bacon' becom…

Sorry about that, We took a calculated call with the editor. For the consumer, a structured tabular view of ingredients make sense but for the author, the structured way of entering it in tables becomes a chore. This is the main problem with creating good recipes. So we try to hit a sweet spot, and bring up a bit of that desired structure the way we parse the ingredients. The writer is learning continuously with more…

No need to apologise! I agree that trying to edit in tabular form would be worse than you have now; I was thinking of nudging the users towards the correct mental model purely by styling the divs that don't have the 'current' class.

Re: Show HN: RecipeWriter – An editor to write recipes

#38

Post by anandgrafiti »

bazzargh wrote: post #37
anandgrafiti wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry about that, We took a calculated call with the editor. For the consumer, a structured tabular view of ingredients make sense but for the author, the structured way of entering it in tables becomes a chore. This is the main problem with creating good recipes. So we try to hit a sweet spot, and bring up a bit of that desired structure the way we parse the ingredients. The writer is learning continuously with more…

No need to apologise! I agree that trying to edit in tabular form would be worse than you have now; I was thinking of nudging the users towards the correct mental model purely by styling the divs that don't have the 'current' class.

I get what you are saying. This is something we are yet to explore. The freeform content editable input mechanism that we use currently is far from perfect with several browser quirks. Added to the common use cases of selection, moving the caret with keyboard etc, it becomes tad more tedius. But it is something we are planning to invest more time on. Thanks a ton for the feedback.

Re: Show HN: RecipeWriter – An editor to write recipes

#39

Post by bazzargh »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #32

Aside: from the vid, what are "2ons" of onion? I've searched and can't find it on Wikipedia. Google's doing it's thing of not letting me limit SERPs to those with the terms I want (yes even when they're in ""). I found a couple of recipes that mention "X ons" of ingredient but ... is it USA ounces to distinguish from "oz" as imperial ounces? It's not in the Dummies book, not on Betty Crockers list, not on Wikipedia,…

In the vid they say '2 nos', not 'ons' for onions and also '4 nos' for lasagna sheets. I'm guessing whoever typed that thought units were required and typed a variant of 'nºs' to mean 'numbers'. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numero_sign

Re: Show HN: RecipeWriter – An editor to write recipes

#40

Post by anandgrafiti »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #27
Cherian wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We had a feature – “create a variation”. Unfortunately the feature did not work well in the real world and we had to pull the plug. Literature cannot be forked the way we think about it in code. My variation of the potpie isn’t simply a fork of the ingredients and editing lines. It’s “likely” a different style altogether and in most cases required the new author to write something ground up. We tried fixing this but…

> My variation of the potpie isn’t simply a fork of the ingredients and editing lines. // There's a few recipes I've used for which this is the case. Same for my mum - I've got magazine clipped recipes of hers that say something along the lines of "add cherries at the end, use sultanas instead of currants; I add a dash of brandy" or others that say "you need to cook for about 45 mins, not 30". I think variations allo…

I guess the use case you mentioned is more to adding variations like an alternate ingredient, or a tip to a step or something like alternative to what is suggested in the original recipe.

We have a wish list in our mind where we can add structured annotations (tips/alt ingredient/photo) to the original literature and have a repository of such stuff residing on top of the original recipe itself.

This way it can become a far more richer data, set in the original context and offer mutual learning to all.

Thoughts?

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