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 it), and have the phone app access the prepared cooking instructions. The '22 tasty recipes' on the main page makes me think that there are only 22 recipes, and that you can't add any as a user, is this correct?
Secondly, are you planning an Android version? I'd pay $10 for it, just for checking it out. If the online service works well, if it can suggest daily menus for me and automatically make shopping lists + cooking instructions and if that works well for ingredients readily available here, I'd even pay $10/month for it. Then over time it should learn my tastes by letting me rate the recipe suggestions and adjust future suggestions on that.
I have thought about using car navigation systems to run something like this. You'd put one on the fridge or kitchen wall with the suction cup that they usually come with, and the software would run on that device. They're usually more rugged than phones. I know someone has a Linux version that runs om TomTom, I don't know if anyone made an Android for TomTom yet...
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 :)
Screw making an Android version, until Google fix it for you. I am in the same problem in Australia, have the SDK and a Nexus One to test, but I am refusing on working on this until we hear from Google. They have not talked about this problem for a long time.
I have really wondered about this objection. Why not just sell it on your website, the way that has worked for computer programs and services forever? You're in full control, can choose any way of charging that you want and so on. Is it less likely that people will find your app? Less likely that they have already registered their credit cards with paypal or amazon than with the appstore? Worse user experience? Anything else?
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 scrolled way down on a Food Gantt chart and go back to the main recipe list and choose another one - the newly selected recipe is at the same scroll offset as the previous (e.g. already scrolled way down).
Suggestions. 1) Show the timer on the Gantt charts - e.g. simple moving forward animation (blink the time remaining for the X cooking step). 2) The standalone timer is a little hard to use and maybe too cutesy - a standard digital timer might work better but might not fit with your aesthetics 3) Social. If you can work out a deal with a cooking website (structure it as win/win - they get an iPhone app, you get the recipes) - you can seed your database in a hurry (I assume the custom graphics for ingredients would max out or could be genericized for the time being). 4) Judging solely on the app size (14.2mb), it appears that you may not be rendering the Gantt charts (e.g. they are drawn by hand? which is why you don't have timer integration). If this is true, this is your critical path - you need to render the Gantt charts as soon as possible.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The Cooking For Engineers guy (http://cookingforengineers.com) has been using a similar format for his recipes, but in a table format. I think this is a great improvement.
Are the timers integrated with the recipe? For example, if the recipe says "bake for 30 minutes" could tapping that start a 30 minute timer?
I think this is a great app! Try to get it in the hands of places like Bon Appetit and chowhound.com.
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 experienced cook it's just noise.
I think you're onto something laying things out visually, I'm just not sure that this is the way it will work best.
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 easy to make, but involves several parts. Experienced cooks recognize the patterns; prepare sauce while you get the chicken started, then braise. But look at the recipes out there and it's a mess. A flow diagram is a great way to getting someone to say "this is something I can do".
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.
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.
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.
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?
Oh gosh, I came here to say please, please, please never use a jpeg for anything with solid colors and contrasting text. The artifacts are killing my happiness. This would also not be that hard to pull off in HTML, and you can use Google Fonts to do the big-courier style.
I think you should split it up into multiple images and text. For one thing it will be more accessible and search-engine friendly, and also... that jpg is horribly compressed :(
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.
Love the idea. Using Gantt charts to plan a meal has never occurred to me, but the idea is brilliant. I'm going to have to try doing that some time. I do have two questions though. From the page it's unclear if I can easily enter my own recipes and also can it handle preparing several different recipes (soup, starter, main course, side dishes and desert) in parallel? If it can't, the app would be pretty useless to me as it stands. Still love the idea and hope you develop it further.
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?
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 <meta> 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.
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?
I would highly recommend the developer add a simple voice recognition functionality. Even something as simple as "next" & "back" which scrolls the screen would improve the usefulness of this app.
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.
Great presentation of a "why didn't anyone think of this?" idea.
Would be good as a web app, especially if you could find a way to let people add their own recipes and have them automagically turn into useful charts.
You could then host those recipes or share them with others (think of Mom telling her son at uni how to make a roast).
ETA: Problems like 'how to create the workflow' may have already been solved by large scale manufacturers. This is simply the kitchen-based equivalent.
Even publishers might be interested if there was a way of taking the bland text input and then having a chart as the output since it would make recipes more readable. As mentioned elsewhere in the thread, an iPad version would also be great.
Your presentation is fantastic. That could be enough to get people interested, finding a way to build a large database of quality recipes that is easy to navigate is what will keep them there.
Kevin Gould's book Dishy did something similiar to this with flow chart types diagrams for the recipes.
My personal problem with recipe apps generally for the iPhone/iPad is that it's hard to use them when your hands are messy from cooking. Even if you don't have to scroll the screen, then you have to turn off the automatic standby and then I inevitably forget to turn it on again and find myself with zero battery unexpectedly.
Looks lovely. This works really well - I've been doing the same thing on paper for years. I do find however, that you need to make the recipe a few times from the long winded version which will often have tips or extra info which can't be crammed into the diagrammatic version.
TBH it would seem more natural as a web app though. Easier to expand content too buf of course it's more difficult to monetize.
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.)
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.
I did not try the app yet, it def looks promising.
Maybe reconsider the background color for your landing page though, that green/brown may not be the most appetizing color out there.
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.
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 it), and have the phone app access the prepared cooking instructions. The '22 tasty recipes' on the main page makes me think that there are only 22 recipes, and that you can't add any as a user, is this correct?
Secondly, are you planning an Android version? I'd pay $10 for it, just for checking it out. If the online service works well, if it can suggest daily menus for me and automatically make shopping lists + cooking instructions and if that works well for ingredients readily available here, I'd even pay $10/month for it. Then over time it should learn my tastes by letting me rate the recipe suggestions and adjust future suggestions on that.
I have thought about using car navigation systems to run something like this. You'd put one on the fridge or kitchen wall with the suction cup that they usually come with, and the software would run on that device. They're usually more rugged than phones. I know someone has a Linux version that runs om TomTom, I don't know if anyone made an Android for TomTom yet...