Show HN: Half Lemons – recipes with the ingredients you have on hand | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Half Lemons – recipes with the ingredients you have on hand

halflemons.com

18 pointsFarProfessor10 comments

The Half Lemons app is available for iOS, and it's the first thing I've built! I'm a product manager by trade, and I learnt to code (Swift) to build HL. Very excited to hear any feedback from the community.

Love the concept and design of the site. Would be great to have a way to see what the experience would be like without having to sign up though. That's usually my first interaction with similar sites to decide if it's "worth" signing up for an account.

Glad to hear you like the site design!

Half Lemons doesn't do accounts. No sign-ups anywhere. It's an app, and it's freely available to download on the App Store. Our website is just a landing page. Hope this helps!

I love the name :)

if you know, you know ;) i'm happy to hear you like it!

hasn't this been done to death over and over?

yes and no.

is Half Lemons the first app to do this? nope. can 9 out of 10 home cooks name another app that does it? also nope. that's because noone's gotten it right.

but iPod wasn't the first mp3 player ;) our secret sauce is our human curation of recipes on the app. a custom search algorithm. and relentless focus on user experience above all.

try it out. you'll see the difference is dramatic!

I do agree Half Lemons does a better job than most of the apps that tackle this problem. Specifically I think the tag layout you’ve built does make it much faster to input your ingredients when you first download.

So I did that and felt like we might be onto something! There was no confirmation button or anything, and then I realized that’s the permanent ingredient tab. Ok.

Then I went over to the recipes tab. The images are way too big, especially once you click into a specific recipe.

The ingredients list is not particularly well formatted. I think making some abbreviations with the measurements would really help.

But the biggest thing is the same issue that every ingredient inventory app runs into. For me to update my ingredients, I have to either mark a curated recipe as cooked, or manually edit the list of ingredients, which isn’t so easy because there is no searching, and some are hidden.

Here are a few suggestions.

- Add search to the ingredients tab. Make it easy to select/deselect availability directly from the search results.

- Show some core ingredients with each recipe in the recipe list. And make them buttons that I can tap or long press, so I can tell Half Lemons if I don’t have those ingredients any more.

- Do the same on each recipe, if I long press on an ingredient.

Wow! Excellent feedback! Sincere thanks for putting in the time to not only try the app, but also share such thoughtful feedback.

I hear you loud & clear that you'd like an easier process for keeping your ingredients up-to-date. This is the common theme I see across your suggestions. We've got some great features in the works to make it happen. You touched on some of them. And suggested good ideas for others that we hadn't considered. Kudos!

Sure! I'm an iOS dev myself and love sharing constructive feedback :)

Looking forward to the next update.

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