Today, I’ll elaborate a little more on my application.
Essentially, Cookbook is an application that will streamline many kitchen-related activities. It goes beyond recipe management to assist in meal planning, ingredient acquisition, and food preparation. Recipe scheduling will allow you to plan out meals months in advance. Ingredients required for scheduled meals will be automatically added to Smart Grocery Lists, so you’ll always know what to buy during your weekly supermarket trip. Or if you’re too busy, just buy it all online. Cookbook ties into Amazon.com and will let you buy ingredients from within the application. With one click, your order is submitted and the items in your shopping cart will be at your door in a few days. Then, to cook with the ingredients, Cookbook’s full-screen mode will allow you to follow recipes on your MacBook. Use the Apple Remote to navigate through recipes, or if your hands are dirty, voice recognition will take its place so you’ll never have to touch a key.
With Cookbook, while there is a certain resemblance to existing applications that manage recipes, those applications do only just that: manage recipes. That’s hardly a complete solution and one of the reasons why the kitchen hasn’t really benefitted from the accessibility that the computer offers. After all, there have been many music jukebox applications before iTunes, but they did little other than manage music with a convoluted interface. Remember Winamp? Yeah, neither do I.
Speaking of interfaces, usability is a huge factor. A good idea is nothing if it’s not well-implemented. That is why Cookbook needs to be extremely intuitive, since the user base will be largely comprised of average computer users. Ideally, the application should be easy enough to use that a first-time user will understand the interface within the first few minutes of ever seeing it. The prospect of a learning curve is one of the main reasons users are deterred from trying something new on a computer or switching to a substantially better product. (Case in point: Mac OS X.)
Assuming Cookbook will be made, it will initially support only one online retailer, Amazon.com. But subsequent versions may very well support other online retailers, making it easy to comparison shop for ingredients within the application. Finally, one click checkout will pay for all items in your cart across multiple stores automatically. It will be a boon for people who are too busy to shop at the supermarket every week.
Over the next week, I’ll be posting more mock-ups of the application to gather feedback. It should be a very exciting competition, especially because everyone has such awesome ideas.
