Hi! I enjoy cooking and writing code and recently I made a recipe and meal planning app that I wanted to share with the cooking community. The main features of the app include finding, creating, and saving recipes, assigning recipes to meal plans, and getting nutrition and shopping lists for recipes. The app also lets you post pictures of your cooking ventures and livestream cooking. I would love it if those who enjoy cooking here can try out my app and let me know what you think about it.
Sounds interesting @CookingAddict. I’m a Mac user and didn’t see it when I searched for it so haven’t had a chance to take a look.
How does it work? I see there’s an option to save recipes - is everything saved in the app or are the links to recipe website saved?
Thank you for your interest! Unfortunately its only on Google play right now I am trying to get an ios version out but i have a day job so depending on how busy I am it might take a while. The basic functionalities are you can find and save recipes, assign recipes to meals and put meals on a calendar. The recipes also have nutrition info and you can get a shopping list for each recipe. If you have a recipe online, theres a function that lets you give it the URL and save the recipe to the app. Right now there’s no way to convert a recipe in the app to a web bersion, but this is something I can work on if a lot of people want it
It sounds interesting @CookingAddict. Though I’m still wondering about the saving feature - are the directions saved to the app as well?
I guess what I’m getting at is I would have an issue if the app is saving everything that someone might need to make the recipe, including directions. To me, and my hunch is many other food bloggers, that would be considered scraping recipe content and actually hurts food bloggers because there’s no reason for people to visit our websites (which is how we make a living).
If it’s not doing that, great! It sounds like there’s a lot of functionality with it.
My app does save directions so your concern is valid. But I should clarify when I referred to ‘save’ it meant two things. So my app shows recipes on its own, but these recipes do not belong to me, they belong to a third party group that I’m partnering with. So when I said save, what I meant was if you come across a recipe in the app that you like, you can mark it as favorite and come back to it easily.
The other function is to convert a recipe from a url and this only works on a well formatted recipe page. So if it’s like a food blog page that has descriptions of food rather than a formatted recipe then it wouldn’t work. But assuming it is well formatted, this will save the name, ingredients, nutrition, and directions of the recipe, but only to your account. But I think you’re right that this is like recipe scraping, I can try to find a way to give the original creator more credit. I guess part of the reason I made the app is because I find recipes hard to follow sometimes so I wanted something that would display all the information for cooking a recipe right next to each other with tabs for ingredients, directions, nutrition, that you can just toggle. Obviously this wouldn’t work if someone can see the ingredients in the app but had to open a separate web page to see the directions
@CookingAddict - it’s a fine line for sure. I do know there are several recipe apps out there (Real Plans comes to mind) that will import a recipe into their app but only for that user.
To me it’s still scraping as someone is taking my words and copyrighted material and putting it into an app or other platform I’m not benefitting from. But short of a food blogger revolt (and believe me, there have been some that have taken down a developer or two), I don’t know what to do about it.
Just food for thought (pun unintended)
Yes, it makes sense. I’ll keep this in mind, thanks!