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

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...

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.

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.

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.

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.

I like the idea and look forward to taking the app for a spin. What should I cook first?

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?

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.

Alton Brown would be proud.

- 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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

- 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!

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.