HN Explorer

Show HN: 7courses, the recipe manager.

23 points by templaedhel ↗ HN
I am happy to announce the updated release of my web app, 7courses.

http://7courses.com/

7courses makes it ridiculously easy to jot down and manage your collection of recipes. As someone who cooks, I often find recipes online or in cookbooks, but have no way to organize them. I have been looking for a digital "recipe box". After plenty of searching I just made my own.

7courses was built around the idea that you should be able to choose how you want to organize your recipes, and doing so should be easy and quick. The UI is responsive and intuitive, with a no frills design. Just jump right in and start adding recipes. The design is mobile optimized, so it will work from your mobile device.

Please feel free to provide critique and suggestions.

29 comments

[ 5.9 ms ] story [ 75.5 ms ] thread
sdoowpilihp
The design is really nice. Maybe I missed it, but is there a way to register without having a google or facebook?
templaedhel
Unfortunately not. I figured most people would, and I wanted to lower the barrier to entry. Plus this was originally a November app project, and so it was faster.
Skywing
I don't cook often but this could be cool. But, as somebody who does not cook often, this would probably be most beneficial to me if I saw a recipe somewhere else and was able to easily bookmark it or import it. I'm not sure how legal that'd be, though, since odds are if I'm seeing a recipe it's probably from another cooking site.

Along that line of thought, perhaps make a social aspect of the site. Maybe a browse-able list of recipes based on ingredients, or type of meal. Kind of like delicious for recipes.

templaedhel
I thought of this, as dogfooding the app to myself I found myself transcribing recipes from all recipes and other sites into the app was a recurrent task. The trouble lies in the implementation. I was thinking along the lines of a bookmarklet, but that requires either detecting ingredients and directions by looking for some sort of html structure + keywords, or allowing the user to select the ingredients on the page, both of which are no small projects.
bobf
Could you handle that by taking a screenshot, allowing the user to crop the area with the actual recipe text, then using OCR?
aik
I filled out an extensive recipe, clicked "Save", and nothing happened :(. I'm using Chrome 8.0.552.224.

Cool design though and seems easy to use. I'm not yet sure if I like the fonts. The fonts remind me of my grandmother's cookbook, and I'm not a grandmother.

templaedhel
Make sure you have something in the title field. If not, I do not know what happened, I would be curious if there are any javascript errors. (right click > inspect element > is there a red x in the bottom right?)
jayzee
You have a nice design. But I rarely share my facebook login with third parties just because of all the 'see contact list and this and that etc.'I think that insisting on it creates a barrier to entry for you.

On my site I discovered that having a demo that people could play with w/o creating an account increased conversion by a multiple.

Consider having a demo that people can try w/o signing on.

luck!

samstokes
Minor typo:

"No Recipies Found"

It's "recipes".

samstokes
Hmmm, less minor point: it says "Why don't you make some", but offers no way to do so. I've tried it in Firefox 3.6 and Chrome 6. I used the Google login in both cases. All I see is:

* <my name>'s Cookbook (clicking it has no effect) * Logout * a search box that does nothing (presumably because there's nothing to search) * the "nothing found" message.

templaedhel
The plus button next to the search button.
samstokes
I couldn't see a plus button or a search button, just a search box. However I just refreshed the page and now I see them (and it works). onload race condition or something?

In Chrome, when I first logged in, I saw a PHP error something to do with passing the wrong number of arguments to json_encode - maybe related? That's also gone away now that I've refreshed.

Now that I can see the UI, it's very nice and intuitive :)

templaedhel
The wrong number was actually me fixing another bug that had shown up. You just refreshed in the wrong 3 second window.
[deleted]
(comment deleted)
minalecs
without a standard register I'm not signing up for your site. Yes I don't want to use my google or facebook login.
buro9
Same boat.

I never use my Google account for anything (too critical for me), and I don't possess a Facebook account.

I was actually looking forward to seeing this site too: It's gotta beat me producing PDFs and leaving them in a dropbox folder (makes it accessible when I'm grocery shopping and have my Android, and when I'm at home and can see my monitor from the kitchen).

templaedhel
Post Mortem on the bug effecting users who were trying to add recipes with no result:

First of all, your recipes were being added, you were just not seeing them. Were you to refresh you would notice them. The error occurred because the master object that javascript stores the recipes in was set to null if there was no recipes. This was due to an json encoding error on the server side. Its been fixed now.

ernestipark
Nice site in general! Pretty good design and keeps things real simple. One thing I'd add is a back button to go back after you open a recipe. Right now I'm clicking the search button to go back which is unintuitive.
chrisbroadfoot
Can you make this social? I want to see other people's recipes (without logging in) and add or modify them to be my own.
MaxGabriel
Wow, I really like the simplicity here. I've been in need of a way to store the drink recipes I've used over the years, and this seems to be a great solution.

Something that would really help me, and I presume chefs because there's alot of categorizing going on there, too, is the ability to tag recipes with a category. SimpleNote on iOS, Web, (and I think Android?) has a good implementation of this. Categorizing a drink as an apertif, or by its glassware or whatever would be a great tool. I think if you were to try this, custom made categories would be crucial.

kongqiu
Nice-looking site!

I added two test recipes. One possible issue: When I click on one recipe and it expands, I don't see any way to "collapse" and go back to the complete recipe list (besides clicking "(User's) Cookbook"...

Since you're already integrating with Facebook, it would be cool to have some social links on each recipe, as well as on the user's entire recipe list (e.g., "Post to Facebook"/"Tweet"/"Email")...

Very nice design; what did you build it with?

cdawzrd
1. Would prefer a non-FB/Google login

2. I can't edit ingredient or direction entries after saving them from the "create recipe" form, I have to delete them and re-enter them.

3. The font is a little over-the-top IMHO

4. Consider using hashtags or something else to make the site more bookmark-friendly and back-button friendly.

EDIT: Thought of some more things:

5. I'd like to be able to optionally have my cookbook accessible to the public via some URL (or maybe on a per-recipe basis?)

6. Mobile styles need a little work (browsing from Android 2.2, the white space for headings / lists looks cramped, text isn't big enough, etc)

7. I'd like to be able to export recipes or the whole cookbook in some plaintext format, email recipes to people, have a print view of recipes, etc.

8. This is just a random idea, but it would be cool if the app automatically formatted ingredient listings, i.e. turning "1-1/4" into "1¼", autocorrecting "t." to "tsp", "T." to "Tbsp", or something? I'm not sure if there is a standard way to do this with non-Metric cooking units, but just something I was pondering.

9. It's really easy to lose your work! No delete confirmation, info gets lost if you refresh the "add recipe" form, etc.

willheim
7 courses? Wow! That's a lot of cooking. Guess someone domain squatted 3-6courses.com. So, if I want to rip off this idea do I have to be 8courses.com? Or could I beat you to the punch with 6courses.com?

Sorry, didn't get past the first page with a forced google/FB login. Change that and I'll try it out.

templaedhel
Good news. I have added a demo page, for those of you who do not wish to use openID to view the app. You can find it at http://7courses.com/demo/

Next up is a non openID user system. I was completely unaware that so many people were opposed to openID logins, but live and learn, I will make sure to support you in this app and any new apps I make.

After that, the feature list looks something like this: 1. Editing recipes.

2. Delete confirm.

3. Printing/PDF support.

4. Download/data portability.

5. Permalinks/Sharing ability.

Thanks again for all the great feedback.

[dead] fluin
You should add video support too