Rate my app: Paprika Recipe Manager for iPad

http://www.paprikaapp.com

by stevenwei • 16 years ago

32 31 16 years ago

http://www.paprikaapp.com

I've always been big into cooking and when the iPad came out I figured it would be the perfect replacement for the massive stack of printed recipes I had collected over the years.

But after trying out the iPad recipe apps in the store, I realized that most of them did not allow you to enter your own recipes, and the ones that did were incredibly cumbersome to use. (E.g. having to enter recipes from an external website, or having to fill out 24 fields to get a single recipe entered.)

So the idea for Paprika Recipe Manager was born, and a few months later, it is now available in the App Store.

The basic premise of Paprika is basically an Instapaper for recipes. It comes with a built in web browser that lets you save recipes from the web. (Which is mostly how I discover my new recipes.)

We designed the app to be as simple as possible to create and save recipes. Some of the other apps in the store require you to enter ingredients one at a time, specifying quantity and units separately, and then entering your recipe directions one step at a time. This makes the process for entering a single recipe way too cumbersome and takes up too much time.

We took the opposite approach and basically give you two big text fields for your ingredients and directions. Entry is completely freeform and you can basically put in whatever you want. This also makes it very easy to save recipes from the web (since they can be presented in all sorts of arbitrary formats).

Features include:

  - Ability to type in your own custom recipes in a fairly easy manner.
  - Ability to save recipes from the web.
  - A grocery list that lets you add recipe ingredients as well as your own items.
  - Fully customizable categories, search, favorites, and emailing recipes.
  - Preventing the screen from turning off while cooking.

Here are a few promo codes to get you guys started:

  E7LL36X4EJYP
  7A7M9LXXLRJJ
  LLK9KAWAYXLJ

Any and all feedback is greatly appreciated. The response has been fairly positive so far (in terms of ratings and reviews), although there is definitely room for us to improve.

I'm especially interested if anyone has thoughts on marketing and promotion. I've done the standard tasks of posting a press release and emailing a bunch of websites/blogs...but don't really know where to go from there. Has anyone had success with a Youtube teaser, or Facebook/Google ads, or buying ad banners on other sites?

stevenwei11• 16 years ago

http://www.paprikaapp.com

I've always been big into cooking and when the iPad came out I figured it would be the perfect replacement for the massive stack of printed recipes I had collected over the years.

So the idea for Paprika Recipe Manager was born, and a few months later, it is now available in the App Store.

The basic premise of Paprika is basically an Instapaper for recipes. It comes with a built in web browser that lets you save recipes from the web. (Which is mostly how I discover my new recipes.)

Features include:

  - Ability to type in your own custom recipes in a fairly easy manner.
  - Ability to save recipes from the web.
  - A grocery list that lets you add recipe ingredients as well as your own items.
  - Fully customizable categories, search, favorites, and emailing recipes.
  - Preventing the screen from turning off while cooking.

Here are a few promo codes to get you guys started:

  E7LL36X4EJYP
  7A7M9LXXLRJJ
  LLK9KAWAYXLJ

Any and all feedback is greatly appreciated. The response has been fairly positive so far (in terms of ratings and reviews), although there is definitely room for us to improve.

Edit - Whoops, managed to post this with a bad url the first time around. Fixed.

derefr• 16 years ago

Whenever I get to thinking about what a Platonic-ideal recipe manager app should have, I go off on the tangent that, since a recipe is just a set of cooking instructions—a program—written to be interpreted by a human, a recipe manager should work a lot like a source code manager. You can branch your recipe, try out a variation, then enter the results (whether it was better or worse than the original), and go back to the original if you didn't like it. I imagine this idea would only be useful for "chefs" as opposed to "cooks"—i.e., people who develop their own recipes, rather than using recipes they find in books/online—but that seems to be somewhat close to your target market, if your differentiating feature is the ability to enter custom recipes.

ugh• 16 years ago

You really seem to have captured how people usually go hunting for recipes, i.e. they type something into Google and browse the myriad available sites. Giving people the ability to easily structure and sort what they like seems like exactly the right thing to do.

I would think that it would be an excellent idea to continue on focusing on exactly that instead of adding shiny features. Recipe apps have to fight proven and battle tested procedures already in place in any kitchen worth its name for collecting and organizing recipes. (I know: 1. Print it out. 2. Put it in transparencies. 3. Put them into a folder. Easy and robust.)

I can think of several things that could help you streamline that process and fight the good fight against paper. Apps have benefits but they are slight so it’s not easy.

You could try to further automate the recognition of recipes on sites you don’t yet know. Try to prefill if you can, the standard selection process of the iPad is not all that much fun to use. If everything else fails don’t force your users to go through that tedious selection process, allow them to save the webpage wholesale. Lower, lower, lower the boundaries of saving a recipe. You are already on that path and I encourage you to follow it. Great app!

stevenwei11• 16 years ago

Yup, that's exactly how I go hunting for recipes, and exactly how I collected recipes pre-iPad (print them out, stick them in a folder).

The goal was to build a tool that suited that workflow the best, while removing the drawbacks of organizing printed stacks of paper: searching through your collection for a specific recipe or a specific category of recipes (e.g. all chocolate desserts).

Thanks for the thoughts, I totally agree on the importance of streamlining recipe saving.

dunham2• 16 years ago

Nice job - the screen shots look good, I'm tempted to ditch my home-grown app, but I'm not sure how easy it'd be to get my recipe database into the app.

One critical feature I'd like to see is a bulk way to get stuff in and out of the app. If you could sync a directory of text and image files with Dropbox, that would be awesome. I want to be able to load my library into it; I want to get stuff back out easily; and it'd be nice to write my own scripts against the datastore. (e.g. epub/pdf conversion).

stevenwei11• 16 years ago

I'm definitely planning on adding import/export into a future version, particularly from existing desktop apps like MasterCook and MacGourmet, but also from a plain text format. The trick with the plain text format is making sure the recipes are consistently formatted so I can pick them up and differentiate the relevant sections.

amr2• 16 years ago

Best recipe manager on the iPad hands down. Bought one for me and one for my wife. Here is what I hope to see in the future:

* Ability to send page from safari to paprika

* Ability to copy URL from paprika browser (currently the recipe capture comes on when trying to select content of address bar)

* Access to safari bookmarks from paprika

* Online storage and syncing (you can make money on subscriptions)

* Shared recipe book, synced through the cloud, for family sharing (That way my wife & I are able to share one resource)

* Wiki-style recipe editing to make experimenting easier without losing the original recipe.

Hope that helps and keep up the good work.

stevenwei11• 16 years ago

Hey thanks for the feedback, it helps a lot. :)

* By sending from Safari to Paprika - do you mean Mobile Safari, or from a desktop browser? I think a bookmarklet might work well for that....will have to think about it.

* The address bar URL thing is a bug that will be fixed in the next release.

* Good call on the Safari bookmarks, we'll consider that.

* We are definitely planning on doing some sort of cloud based recipe backup/sync/sharing.

dgallagher2• 16 years ago

I haven't looked at your app yet, so I'm assuming it doesn't have this feature described below (I haven't seen it yet in any recipe app yet - if yours has it I'm buying it immediately! :) ).

Basically, whenever I want to cook something new, I look for a recipe in an app/online and find something that looks really good. Then I look at the recipe list, realize I'm missing like 3 or 4 things on the list, get disappointed since I don't have the time to go to the grocery store, and then go and cook something else.

A feature I'm DYING to have is this:

1) Let me list every food item I have in my kitchen (e.g. select them (fruits/veggies), scanning bar-codes would be really nice but not 100% necessary).

2) Let me list what cooking equipment I have.

3) The app returns "ONLY" recipe's I can make given what I have in my kitchen.

Currently the recipe apps I've tried (Epicurious, Whole Foods's app) don't do this. Epicurious "kind-of" lets you select main ingredients, but you damn well have the kitchen of a chef, stocked up nicely with basil leaves and minced thyme to cook much of anything. Don't have a pressure cooker? Out of luck yet again...

Whole Food's app felt like a giant advertisement just to buy the most expensive ingredients at their store. ;)

For a single someone like me whose not a foodie, wants some variety in meals, and is rushed for time on occasion, a recipe app that listed only what I can make "right now" would be really really nice to have.

--------------------

Taking that idea a bit further, it would also be nice to have suggestions of food/equipment to buy in the near future, which would increase the number of recipe's one could prepare.

For example; "If you buy a rice steamer, you'll increase the number of "right now" recipe's by 25%, and you'll be able to cook things such as steamed asparagus and steamed salmon." Etc...

General advice for someone as ignorant as myself as to what to "always have" in the kitchen.

stevenwei11• 16 years ago

That's a really interesting idea, and we've had a few requests for something similar.

My question to you is: are you really going to be willing to keep your iPad updated with every single ingredient you have in your fridge, and every single spice in your pantry, especially as things get used up, thrown out, and replaced?

dgallagher2• 16 years ago

Great question.

Generally, I tend to have certain ingredients always-on-hand. There are others which I buy occasionally but don't always have. And of course things do run out as the week progresses. In a nutshell, having to re-enter everything every time would be tedious. But imagine this...

The app keeps a history of food you've entered into it already. When you load it up it displays foods as icons. There's a picture of your kitchen (fridge/shelf) with food icons sitting in it. This is what you have now, and you can drag/drop food into your kitchen. There's also a side-bar shelf, your "food history". This is stuff that you ran out of. Drag/drop food to/from here into your kitchen, and suddenly you have a visual inventory management system that isn't just some giant cumbersome UITableView.

Ideally you could add/remove stuff from your food history. It would end up being a general list of all the food you "usually" buy. Initially populating that list would be time-consuming, but afterwords it would be fairly easy to keep things updated. You could also mark an ingredient as "rare", and tell the app not to save if for later in your history.

This wouldn't work so well for someone who has a high-turnover of ingredients, and buys a fairly large variety of different stuff. But my hunch is that most people likely buy the same stuff over the course of a month or two. I'm not sure if that's true of everyone, but if it is, an easy-to-use inventory management system like/similar to what I described might work out good. I'd definitely use it; the benefit from shuffling around a virtual inventory for a few minutes would pay for the experience to eat something different/new, rather than settling for the same-old.

prawn2• 16 years ago

Perhaps a list of potential substitutes for ingredients you don't have with a confidence-level that shows the impact on the dish.

bnycum• 16 years ago

This is a great idea. My wife does (healthier) ingredient substitutions all the time, or if she is accidentally out of something. One thing she uses is apple sauce instead of butter/oil in cakes or brownies, you don't even notice it at all.

awolf• 16 years ago

You want: http://www.supercook.com/

bignoggins• 16 years ago

App looks great, also seems to be doing really well on the app store congrats!

noverloop• 16 years ago

This app looks like a good candidate for some idea I and my gf had a while ago, I'm not going to implement this so feel free to take it. There should be a feature to rate (or like) recipes, so you can then recommend recipes based on what other users liked. That makes it easy to discover new recipes that suits your tastes.

I don't have an iPad so I'm not able to review your app, good luck.

templaedhel• 16 years ago

Oh man, somewhere on my todo list I wanted to create somewhere to store recipes, via iphone/ipad, instead of just allrecipies etc, which just lets you read them. You beat me, congrats, this looks amazing. I think there is a lot of people who will use this. Also the name is great.

stevenwei11• 16 years ago

Thanks! Glad you like the name. :)

jasonlotito• 16 years ago

Dear Sir,

I just purchased this app. It's awesome. I mean, it's like someone actually dealt with recipe sites, and wanted to use their iPad for getting those recipes and planning meals and shopping lists. I know you built this app because YOU wanted to use it. And I know you use it. And that's why it's pure awesome. In the first 2 minutes of using it, I'd saved several recipes from sites and it worked. Easily.

Congratulations, this is an awesome app, worth every penny.

stevenwei11• 16 years ago

Wow! Responses like this make working on these apps all the more worthwhile. Thank you so much, and really glad you're enjoying the app!

rbritton• 16 years ago

I've been toying with it a bit today, and it's definitely the best recipe manager I've tried out on the iPad. In no particular order, some notes:

- When entering the recipe name consider changing the autocapitalizationType property on that text field to UITextAutocapitalizationTypeWords.

- Some sort of auto-numbering for the preparation steps field would be nice, but I do understand this is non-trivial. Certain recipes have multiple concurrent groups of steps, so the solution would either have to be perfect or free-form would be better.

- When creating a recipe in landscape mode, the keyboard hides a couple of the fields in the modal panel. You have to manually dismiss the keyboard in order to see them.

- Also when creating a recipe, consider auto-selecting the default recipe name for easy deletion as well as defaulting the category to the currently selected category rather than "Uncategorized".

- Overall I very much appreciate the simplicity of the app. I'd just like some way to bulk import my current database into it and I'd likely use it more frequently than my current desktop app (SousChef).

stevenwei11• 16 years ago

Thanks for the feedback - the auto capitalization is a great idea, as is turning the default recipe name into an easily removed placeholder.

Definitely planning on adding a SousChef importer into a future release - please feel free to shoot me an email as I'm sure I'll need a few folks with existing recipe databases to help test against.

_b8r0• 16 years ago

Haven't tried the app but looking at the side I have a couple of thoughts.

You're going to have a mine of user-generated content. Sync the recipes with a server and let people publish their recipes as well as comment on them. Make the recipes public and add a link to the iPad app on every Internet web page. Implement a scoring system. Give people points for publishing their recipes with multipliers based on comments/upvotes to encourage sharing.

Allow people to put in the ingredients they have and give them a selection of dishes with options to have dishes that include those ingredients, or dishes that only have those ingredients. Sync the details of what ingredients people have, anonymise it - you can sell this.

Use the geo-location capability to find nearby supermarkets. Add in the capapbility to get online vouchers for discounts from supermarkets. Again, you can charge the supermarkets to reach your customers if you have enough.

anthonys• 16 years ago

Ok a couple of things i'd like to see (Note: I haven't used the app yet so this is based on the video/reading the features).

1. The ability for the program to convert the units between Imperial and Metric. This way, it doesn't matter where your recipe comes from. As Epicurious is American, and I am in Australia, this would be my number 1.

2. The ability for the app to product a consolidated shopping list. So if I pick a few recipes to get ingredients for, it should produce a consolidated shopping list (ie. combine the same products)

3. An ingredient glossary. Some recipe's have things I have never heard of in. It would be good to be able to link through to a glossary to learn more about it

4. Another good thing would be the ability to plan out a week of food, or even have suggested menus based on what I have eaten in the past (This is probably getting a little heavy...). It could be based on the concept of 'Other people who ate X had Y'. Linking this with the consolidated shopping list would also be quite handy.

5. Dare I say it, but some sort of social element would be good. Adopting KISS, it could be like the http://pinboard.in of recipes. Very simple tags, etc.

------

Another one.

6. When you cook something for someone, and they ask for the recipe, it would be cool to be able to send it to their instance of Paprika or export a formatted PDF (On top of the email)

Rate my app: Paprika Recipe Manager for iPad

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