

Rate my app: Paprika Recipe Manager for iPad - stevenwei
http://www.paprikaapp.com
http://www.paprikaapp.com<p>I've always been big into cooking and when the iPad came out I figured it would be the perfect replacement for the massive stack of printed recipes I had collected over the years.<p>But after trying out the iPad recipe apps in the store, I realized that most of them did not allow you to enter your own recipes, and the ones that did were incredibly cumbersome to use. (E.g. having to enter recipes from an external website, or having to fill out 24 fields to get a single recipe entered.)<p>So the idea for Paprika Recipe Manager was born, and a few months later, it is now available in the App Store.<p>The basic premise of Paprika is basically an Instapaper for recipes. It comes with a built in web browser that lets you save recipes from the web. (Which is mostly how I discover my new recipes.)<p>We designed the app to be as simple as possible to create and save recipes. Some of the other apps in the store require you to enter ingredients one at a time, specifying quantity and units separately, and then entering your recipe directions one step at a time. This makes the process for entering a single recipe way too cumbersome and takes up too much time.<p>We took the opposite approach and basically give you two big text fields for your ingredients and directions. Entry is completely freeform and you can basically put in whatever you want. This also makes it very easy to save recipes from the web (since they can be presented in all sorts of arbitrary formats).<p>Features include:<p><pre><code>  - Ability to type in your own custom recipes in a fairly easy manner.
  - Ability to save recipes from the web.
  - A grocery list that lets you add recipe ingredients as well as your own items.
  - Fully customizable categories, search, favorites, and emailing recipes.
  - Preventing the screen from turning off while cooking.
</code></pre>
Here are a few promo codes to get you guys started:<p><pre><code>  E7LL36X4EJYP
  7A7M9LXXLRJJ
  LLK9KAWAYXLJ
</code></pre>
Any and all feedback is greatly appreciated. The response has been fairly positive so far (in terms of ratings and reviews), although there is definitely room for us to improve.<p>I'm especially interested if anyone has thoughts on marketing and promotion. I've done the standard tasks of posting a press release and emailing a bunch of websites/blogs...but don't really know where to go from there. Has anyone had success with a Youtube teaser, or Facebook/Google ads, or buying ad banners on other sites?
======
dgallagher
I haven't looked at your app yet, so I'm assuming it doesn't have this feature
described below (I haven't seen it yet in any recipe app yet - if yours has it
I'm buying it immediately! :) ).

Basically, whenever I want to cook something new, I look for a recipe in an
app/online and find something that looks really good. Then I look at the
recipe list, realize I'm missing like 3 or 4 things on the list, get
disappointed since I don't have the time to go to the grocery store, and then
go and cook something else.

A feature I'm DYING to have is this:

1) Let me list every food item I have in my kitchen (e.g. select them
(fruits/veggies), scanning bar-codes would be really nice but not 100%
necessary).

2) Let me list what cooking equipment I have.

3) The app returns "ONLY" recipe's I can make given what I have in my kitchen.

Currently the recipe apps I've tried (Epicurious, Whole Foods's app) don't do
this. Epicurious "kind-of" lets you select main ingredients, but you damn well
have the kitchen of a chef, stocked up nicely with basil leaves and minced
thyme to cook much of anything. Don't have a pressure cooker? Out of luck yet
again...

Whole Food's app felt like a giant advertisement just to buy the most
expensive ingredients at their store. ;)

For a single someone like me whose not a foodie, wants some variety in meals,
and is rushed for time on occasion, a recipe app that listed only what I can
make "right now" would be really really nice to have.

\--------------------

Taking that idea a bit further, it would also be nice to have suggestions of
food/equipment to buy in the near future, which would increase the number of
recipe's one could prepare.

For example; "If you buy a rice steamer, you'll increase the number of "right
now" recipe's by 25%, and you'll be able to cook things such as steamed
asparagus and steamed salmon." Etc...

General advice for someone as ignorant as myself as to what to "always have"
in the kitchen.

~~~
stevenwei
That's a really interesting idea, and we've had a few requests for something
similar.

My question to you is: are you really going to be willing to keep your iPad
updated with every single ingredient you have in your fridge, and every single
spice in your pantry, especially as things get used up, thrown out, and
replaced?

~~~
dgallagher
Great question.

Generally, I tend to have certain ingredients always-on-hand. There are others
which I buy occasionally but don't always have. And of course things do run
out as the week progresses. In a nutshell, having to re-enter everything every
time would be tedious. But imagine this...

The app keeps a history of food you've entered into it already. When you load
it up it displays foods as icons. There's a picture of your kitchen
(fridge/shelf) with food icons sitting in it. This is what you have now, and
you can drag/drop food into your kitchen. There's also a side-bar shelf, your
"food history". This is stuff that you ran out of. Drag/drop food to/from here
into your kitchen, and suddenly you have a visual inventory management system
that isn't just some giant cumbersome UITableView.

Ideally you could add/remove stuff from your food history. It would end up
being a general list of all the food you "usually" buy. Initially populating
that list would be time-consuming, but afterwords it would be fairly easy to
keep things updated. You could also mark an ingredient as "rare", and tell the
app not to save if for later in your history.

This wouldn't work so well for someone who has a high-turnover of ingredients,
and buys a fairly large variety of different stuff. But my hunch is that most
people likely buy the same stuff over the course of a month or two. I'm not
sure if that's true of everyone, but if it is, an easy-to-use inventory
management system like/similar to what I described might work out good. I'd
definitely use it; the benefit from shuffling around a virtual inventory for a
few minutes would pay for the experience to eat something different/new,
rather than settling for the same-old.

~~~
christonog
I could see this being a sort of shopping list companion for the iphone as
well. You make a set list of recipes that you want to make for a week per say.
You use the iphone to find the ingredients at the grocery store, and as you
check them off on the ipad while making your dishes, the app is smart enough
to keep track of what you have left, and what recipes you can still make. I
bet food companies would love to have sponsored recipes with their branded
food items as ingredients, and know how much of an ingredient a user has at a
certain time for upselling through coupons.

~~~
stevenwei
We're definitely planning to release an iPhone companion app as well. That way
you can select your favorite recipes to save onto your grocery list on your
iPad, then simply take your iPhone to the grocery store and mark off items as
you purchase them.

------
jasonlotito
Dear Sir,

I just purchased this app. It's awesome. I mean, it's like someone actually
dealt with recipe sites, and wanted to use their iPad for getting those
recipes and planning meals and shopping lists. I know you built this app
because YOU wanted to use it. And I know you use it. And that's why it's pure
awesome. In the first 2 minutes of using it, I'd saved several recipes from
sites and it worked. Easily.

Congratulations, this is an awesome app, worth every penny.

~~~
stevenwei
Wow! Responses like this make working on these apps all the more worthwhile.
Thank you so much, and really glad you're enjoying the app!

------
rbritton
I've been toying with it a bit today, and it's definitely the best recipe
manager I've tried out on the iPad. In no particular order, some notes:

\- When entering the recipe name consider changing the autocapitalizationType
property on that text field to UITextAutocapitalizationTypeWords.

\- Some sort of auto-numbering for the preparation steps field would be nice,
but I do understand this is non-trivial. Certain recipes have multiple
concurrent groups of steps, so the solution would either have to be perfect or
free-form would be better.

\- When creating a recipe in landscape mode, the keyboard hides a couple of
the fields in the modal panel. You have to manually dismiss the keyboard in
order to see them.

\- Also when creating a recipe, consider auto-selecting the default recipe
name for easy deletion as well as defaulting the category to the currently
selected category rather than "Uncategorized".

\- Overall I very much appreciate the simplicity of the app. I'd just like
some way to bulk import my current database into it and I'd likely use it more
frequently than my current desktop app (SousChef).

~~~
stevenwei
Thanks for the feedback - the auto capitalization is a great idea, as is
turning the default recipe name into an easily removed placeholder.

Definitely planning on adding a SousChef importer into a future release -
please feel free to shoot me an email as I'm sure I'll need a few folks with
existing recipe databases to help test against.

------
stevenwei
<http://www.paprikaapp.com>

I've always been big into cooking and when the iPad came out I figured it
would be the perfect replacement for the massive stack of printed recipes I
had collected over the years.

But after trying out the iPad recipe apps in the store, I realized that most
of them did not allow you to enter your own recipes, and the ones that did
were incredibly cumbersome to use. (E.g. having to enter recipes from an
external website, or having to fill out 24 fields to get a single recipe
entered.)

So the idea for Paprika Recipe Manager was born, and a few months later, it is
now available in the App Store.

The basic premise of Paprika is basically an Instapaper for recipes. It comes
with a built in web browser that lets you save recipes from the web. (Which is
mostly how I discover my new recipes.)

We designed the app to be as simple as possible to create and save recipes.
Some of the other apps in the store require you to enter ingredients one at a
time, specifying quantity and units separately, and then entering your recipe
directions one step at a time. This makes the process for entering a single
recipe way too cumbersome and takes up too much time.

We took the opposite approach and basically give you two big text fields for
your ingredients and directions. Entry is completely freeform and you can
basically put in whatever you want. This also makes it very easy to save
recipes from the web (since they can be presented in all sorts of arbitrary
formats).

Features include:

    
    
      - Ability to type in your own custom recipes in a fairly easy manner.
      - Ability to save recipes from the web.
      - A grocery list that lets you add recipe ingredients as well as your own items.
      - Fully customizable categories, search, favorites, and emailing recipes.
      - Preventing the screen from turning off while cooking.
    

Here are a few promo codes to get you guys started:

    
    
      E7LL36X4EJYP
      7A7M9LXXLRJJ
      LLK9KAWAYXLJ
    

Any and all feedback is greatly appreciated. The response has been fairly
positive so far (in terms of ratings and reviews), although there is
definitely room for us to improve.

I'm especially interested if anyone has thoughts on marketing and promotion.
I've done the standard tasks of posting a press release and emailing a bunch
of websites/blogs...but don't really know where to go from there. Has anyone
had success with a Youtube teaser, or Facebook/Google ads, or buying ad
banners on other sites?

Edit - Whoops, managed to post this with a bad url the first time around.
Fixed.

~~~
ugh
You really seem to have captured how people usually go hunting for recipes,
i.e. they type something into Google and browse the myriad available sites.
Giving people the ability to easily structure and sort what they like seems
like exactly the right thing to do.

I would think that it would be an excellent idea to continue on focusing on
exactly that instead of adding shiny features. Recipe apps have to fight
proven and battle tested procedures already in place in any kitchen worth its
name for collecting and organizing recipes. (I know: 1. Print it out. 2. Put
it in transparencies. 3. Put them into a folder. Easy and robust.)

I can think of several things that could help you streamline that process and
fight the good fight against paper. Apps have benefits but they are slight so
it’s not easy.

You could try to further automate the recognition of recipes on sites you
don’t yet know. Try to prefill if you can, the standard selection process of
the iPad is not all that much fun to use. If everything else fails don’t force
your users to go through that tedious selection process, allow them to save
the webpage wholesale. Lower, lower, lower the boundaries of saving a recipe.
You are already on that path and I encourage you to follow it. Great app!

~~~
stevenwei
Yup, that's exactly how I go hunting for recipes, and exactly how I collected
recipes pre-iPad (print them out, stick them in a folder).

The goal was to build a tool that suited that workflow the best, while
removing the drawbacks of organizing printed stacks of paper: searching
through your collection for a specific recipe or a specific category of
recipes (e.g. all chocolate desserts).

Thanks for the thoughts, I totally agree on the importance of streamlining
recipe saving.

------
iuguy
Haven't tried the app but looking at the side I have a couple of thoughts.

You're going to have a mine of user-generated content. Sync the recipes with a
server and let people publish their recipes as well as comment on them. Make
the recipes public and add a link to the iPad app on every Internet web page.
Implement a scoring system. Give people points for publishing their recipes
with multipliers based on comments/upvotes to encourage sharing.

Allow people to put in the ingredients they have and give them a selection of
dishes with options to have dishes that include those ingredients, or dishes
that only have those ingredients. Sync the details of what ingredients people
have, anonymise it - you can sell this.

Use the geo-location capability to find nearby supermarkets. Add in the
capapbility to get online vouchers for discounts from supermarkets. Again, you
can charge the supermarkets to reach your customers if you have enough.

------
anthonys
Ok a couple of things i'd like to see (Note: I haven't used the app yet so
this is based on the video/reading the features).

1\. The ability for the program to convert the units between Imperial and
Metric. This way, it doesn't matter where your recipe comes from. As
Epicurious is American, and I am in Australia, this would be my number 1.

2\. The ability for the app to product a consolidated shopping list. So if I
pick a few recipes to get ingredients for, it should produce a consolidated
shopping list (ie. combine the same products)

3\. An ingredient glossary. Some recipe's have things I have never heard of
in. It would be good to be able to link through to a glossary to learn more
about it

4\. Another good thing would be the ability to plan out a week of food, or
even have suggested menus based on what I have eaten in the past (This is
probably getting a little heavy...). It could be based on the concept of
'Other people who ate X had Y'. Linking this with the consolidated shopping
list would also be quite handy.

5\. Dare I say it, but some sort of social element would be good. Adopting
KISS, it could be like the <http://pinboard.in> of recipes. Very simple tags,
etc.

\------

Another one.

6\. When you cook something for someone, and they ask for the recipe, it would
be cool to be able to send it to their instance of Paprika or export a
formatted PDF (On top of the email)

------
templaedhel
Oh man, somewhere on my todo list I wanted to create somewhere to store
recipes, via iphone/ipad, instead of just allrecipies etc, which just lets you
read them. You beat me, congrats, this looks amazing. I think there is a lot
of people who will use this. Also the name is great.

~~~
stevenwei
Thanks! Glad you like the name. :)

------
bignoggins
App looks great, also seems to be doing really well on the app store congrats!

------
noverloop
This app looks like a good candidate for some idea I and my gf had a while
ago, I'm not going to implement this so feel free to take it. There should be
a feature to rate (or like) recipes, so you can then recommend recipes based
on what other users liked. That makes it easy to discover new recipes that
suits your tastes.

I don't have an iPad so I'm not able to review your app, good luck.

