
Rate my iPhone app: cooking recipes as Gantt charts. Tell me what you think. - jerguismi
http://kangasbros.fi/visual-cookbook/
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roel_v
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...

~~~
jerguismi
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.

~~~
roel_v
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 :)

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

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wallflower
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.

~~~
jerguismi
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.

~~~
wallflower
Congrats on implementing the Minimum Viable Product!

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

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briancooley
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.

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

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jsolson
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>

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swalberg
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.

~~~
jerguismi
I guess the timer integration is first on the list, thanks for the suggestion.

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Tyrannosaurs
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.

~~~
swalberg
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".

~~~
Tyrannosaurs
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.

~~~
jasonlotito
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.

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rossj
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.

~~~
king_jester
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.

~~~
jerguismi
> 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.

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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?

~~~
jerguismi
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 :)

~~~
tmcw
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.

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DrJokepu
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.

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

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dagw
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.

~~~
jerguismi
At current state it is just minimum viable product, therefore not much
functionality.

Based on the feedback we have for the first day since realease, we will
definitely keep developing the app further. Thanks.

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xutopia
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...](http://img.skitch.com/20100902-jc1b8tjam53ru1qeps5u18gy4u.jpg))
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?

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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 <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.

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bmelton
For everybody saying 'I already had this idea, but never did it', bravo. I
never had this idea, and of course, never did it, but I highly approve.

Alton Brown would be proud.

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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?

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tomjen3
Nice idea, but I would be concerned about using my iPhone in the kitchen - how
do I avoid it getting greasy.

~~~
Elite
This is a pretty big flaw.

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.

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aw3c2
And automatic scrolling.

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franck
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.

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amirmc
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.

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figment
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.

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julietteculver
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.

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stevek
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.

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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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NEPatriot
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.

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neilk
I had this idea ages ago, but never did anything about it. Your implementation
looks gorgeous. I'll check it out.

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tocomment
Who designed your site? I like it? What kind of marketing are you doing?

~~~
jerguismi
The design is by my girlfriend, if you need design projects feel free to email
her at smhuotari@gmail.com :)

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SebMortelmans
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.

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petervandijck
That's awesome. Market it like crazy, it should do well.

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gravitymonkey
<applause> Well done. The real test would be to try to cook something, but
just on design and concept alone, I think it's great.

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bconway
This is a fantastic idea. I can't count the number of times I read through a
recipe while preparing, only to have my timing still be off.

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qqqq2010
Typo: I think you probably meant garlic 'cloves' not garlic 'gloves' in the
onscreen recipe. Minor, but I noticed.

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tibbon
I won't know until I try cooking with it, but it looks pretty awesome upfront.
Good presentation too!

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

~~~
jerguismi
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.

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samratjp
It's definitely something I've been looking for - I do wish there were a demo
video!

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itblarg
Love how you've visualized cooking as a process. Very well done!

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sgt
That is just about the most brilliant thing I've seen all week!

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tocomment
Is there a version for iPad?

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swaits
That's fucking awesome!

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VladRussian
respect, man!

