Show HN: Rapid Recipe – Reader mode for recipes | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Rapid Recipe – Reader mode for recipes

rapidrecipe.reichel.dev

33 pointsrreichel0321 comments

Hey HN folks! Do you ever wish you could just bypass the entire life story at the beginning of every recipe? It drove me crazy the other day when I was just trying to find a recipe for some chicken wings so I decided to do something about it, just in time for the Holidays.

Rapid Recipe automatically detects when you’re reading a recipe and renders just the recipe without all of the backstory. It’s an App Safari Extension for iOS and macOS that you buy, set up once and it runs forever!

Nice extension :) I assume this is using the sites own search engine metadata a-la https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/structure... ?

I did a little digging into this a while ago for a hobby project, but it never went anywhere. Well done for shipping! :D

Thanks! That's right in line with what I did.

My development directory fully empathizes with starting something and not quite shipping it. I ended up getting this working because I time boxed myself, which was surprisingly successful for me. I'm planning on continuing to time box for future projects like this. May not work for everyone, but could be worth a try.

This is a great idea! Especially nice now that Safari extensions can be shared between iOS and Mac.

I do think it faces some competition from Mela[1], but Mela's approach is to be a whole recipe manager and you get stuff into it via the Share extension. I don't necessarily want all recipes in my own database. Sometimes I just want a recipe once. Mela is also more expensive (buy separately for Mac and iOS).

[1] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/mela-recipe-manager/id15689244...

Could this get the same kind of backlash as Recipeasly.com earlier this year? [1, 2]

Should it?

I realise Recipeasly was republishing stripped recipe content (search-indexably). Is that a sufficient difference?

[1] Twitter announcement and thread: https://twitter.com/redman/status/1366137187117506560

[2] Mainstream news blow-up: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26311101

my understanding is that recipeasly was "stealing" page views from the blogs which led to ad revenue decline. this extension modifies the page afaik so shouldn't be the same issue.

As others have said, you're not going to get a lot of purchases without being able to preview what it does first (maybe build some slightly contrived examples?).

I wish there were just a standardised way for recipes to be presented. If I'm on a desktop or tablet, I want ingredients on the left, method on the right, a picture of how it's supposed to look at the top, perhaps some serving suggestions at the bottom, and maybe a few interstitial pictures/videos in the method if it's something really difficult (I'm happy for these to appear in a modal). On mobile, I want the ingredients at the top and the method beneath it. I never want the life story. Having comments at the bottom is sometimes quite nice but fairly optional. I'd like to be able to toggle units to things that I'm comfortable with (I don't want ounces and cups but it should be possible for people who do).

This shouldn't be too much to ask, it really shouldn't.

People have their own preferences on how they want recipes displayed. I think it is too much too ask that everyone who displays recipes does so according to my preferences. However, it would be nice if a lightweight method for marking up recipes caught on so that I would be able to set my preferences how I want. But of course this requires not only a standard to catch on, but for there to be sufficient tools to make it easy for those who post recipes to use it.

So its an aggregation technology that strips out the work from the people who make those terrible recipe ad blogs (but on most sites they do have a jump to the recipe button). Though without the people making the recipe blogs (with agreeable terrible revenue models & likely low revenue) this would not be a value ad technology.

Not sure this solves the problem - only a short term solution to a poor market structure. And how long does this run until it has to make revenue in some way?

Feature request (not even sure this is possible) but if in the instructions you could add the measurements instead of what every recipe on the planet does and just say their name.

Example: "Put eggs, flour, sugar and butter in the bowl"

And it should be: "Put 2 eggs, 1 cup of flour, 1/2 cup sugar and 1 stick of butter in the bowl"

That where recipes goes wrong, how much is a cup or a 1/2 cup? How much is a stick of butter? Why not 250gr of flower, 125 gr of sugar, 100gr of butter.

If you really want to know, this video covers this issue well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TE8xg3d8dBg

Very cool project, I launched a similar project called Repibox.com that works on chrome and firefox. However, I like how you got this working for iOS, which is something I didn't get to do. Also, your layout is very clean. Well done!

That's great! I had some friends who are Android users who would love to use this so I'll send this their way.

It would be better if we could take a look at the application before we decide if we're going to buy or not. There's so little information on the website that makes us convinced to buy this app.

That's great feedback! I'll work on putting together a before/after - That should better communicate how it works. EDIT: Just added a side by side comparison of the page - Its not the cleanest but hopefully shows you what it does!

Do you ship a local language model with the extension or is it cloud based?

Currently its just shipping in English but if you browse a recipe website that is in another language it _should_ work if the recipe follows the standard metadata formats. If you come across a specific foreign language recipe that you think should work and doesn't shoot me an email at rapidrecipe AT reichel.dev

So the language model is fully offline? If I go to an NSFW recipe site, the data will not be sent to some far off server?

That's correct - Most recipe websites actually already encode the recipe in a structured format which is what this is parsing. No AI model is needed to decipher what is and isn't a recipe!

uhm, no preview/example?

edit: the preview image is cut off at the bottom at some screen widths. I now changed my window size and have a slightly better idea of what it does.

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