My Dream App

Ah, Cookbook. The punching bag app! Michael has taken every blow thrown his way with patience, graciousness and style and keeps on coming back for more. If for no other reason, Michael deserves a gold medal for Grace Under Pressure. Fortunately for Michael, there are plenty more reasons to like Cookbook than that. Granted, of all the contestants, Michael had an initial head-start advantage in that he had already developed this concept and had produced some pretty tight mocks before the contest was even announced (cheater)–so he was able to hit the ground running and establish Cookbook as an early favorite even before the initial 24 were chosen. Not one to rest on his laurels though, Michael has been in non-stop high-gear refining, tweaking, responding, and defending his idea to the point that the only question is, when does it ship? To the critics who claim that it’s been done before ad infinitum, ad nauseum, that doesn’t mean it has been done right. I know the phrase “…done right” is way overused, but it is what this genre has needed and if there was ever a development team assembled to pull it off, it’s this one. Just like the iPod wasn’t the first MP3 player and iTunes wasn’t the first online music store, they have succeeded where others have miserably failed because they were “done right.” Cookbook has that potential and I think qualifies for that Dream App status.

Sure, Cookbook has limited appeal to those that like to cook and follow recipes and be organized. But I have to think it’s a big enough market (one that nicely overlays the Mac-buying demographic and has money) to justify the need. A Dream App qualification is not necessarily homogenized, mass-market appeal. In Cookbook’s case, I think it can define a market as the de facto measure of the crème de la crème of cooking apps. My vote is for Cookbook.

I think Cookbook is the big loser of this space. We all knew in 1981 that recipes were the #1 use for computers. But nowadays email, web browsing, blogging, music and movies are the collective killer apps for real people. When was the last time I pulled up a recipe program? Ummm… 1982?

This one is an easy winner. The potential market is large, and if executed well (functional, beautiful and EASY), Cookbook should enjoy good, steady sales. It’s not going to be gigantic, but it’ll sell well unless we really screw things up. And if we can create a community around RecipeCasting or RecipeSS, it’ll grow, and grow well. And it’ll make people happy along the way.

More importantly, there are no large technical challenges to writing it. There’s a lot of work there, certainly - it’s a large program. But it’s all completely conventional code and techniques. Lots of the development time can, and should, be spent on design and workflow analysis.

Ease Of Programming: high
Potential Earnings: high
Social Good: moderate

Finally, Michael looks like he’ll be absolutely stellar to work with during development! His ability to simplify a complex idea into a UI that seems simple yet is still powerful is absolutely first rate, and he’s been completely receptive and friendly all the way through.

Easy to code, easy to sell. Vote for Cookbook!

Cookbook excites me because, as a recent Mac switcher, it seems to me to be what the Mac is all about. Taking an app that’s obviously a good idea, but has never been done right, and doing it right. Not designing the app that is easy for developers, or that makes sense from a programming point of view or a technical person’s point of view, but making the app that does what the end user needs to do. For Cookbook that means letting me schedule my meals on a calendar, letting me schedule parties, letting me schedule holiday events. Then Cookbook automatically makes my shopping list the week before, with everything I need for my party, or everything I’ll need for meals that week. How obvious is that?! Yet nobody has done it before.

This idea get me caught right from the beginning. From day one it featured great mock-ups. They were detailed, well thought-out, and looked beautiful. It amazed me again and again how you can present seemingly boring things such as recipes. Since it started as a solid idea from the beginning it could concentrate on elaborating specific details over the course of the contest. It looks beautiful. I want it and so it’s one of my favorites.

There’s no doubt in my mind that this is a stylish little recipe app. I worry a little about Cookbook because there are so many fantastic recipe websites/communities already a hit with cooks online. Also, with so many people having less and less time to plan meals, I think there needs to be some sticky features to this app that appeal to the time-strapped crowd ( i.e. maybe theme the app to include only recipes for 20-minute meals!).

Unlike ideas like Hijack, Atmosphere, or Blossom, there ARE already Cookbook apps out there. But frankly, they all suck, which is why we let Cookbook in as a finalist. And throughout the event, Michael’s been consistently wowing us all with some truly well thought out UI mockups and a great eye for a tight feature set. This could take something that’s been done in a boring way previously, and make it into something exciting, much like how Delicious Library totally one-upped the rest of the media management market.

Michael’s a great contestant and he’s someone I’d be very happy to work with. He has a great design sensibility and he’s shown a high level of professionalism every step of the way.

The bottom line with Cookbook is that if Apple were ever to do an app along these lines, this is how they’d do it. And it seems like others are also seeing that so that’s why Cookbook’s been such a strong contender throught the whole contest.

I’m really glad Michael’s de-emphasizing Amazon integration and if Cookbook does win I’ll be pushing hard to get the feature de-emphasized to the point where it gets cut from the app as I strongly feel it’s a useless feature. And for those of you who think cutting this is wrong, let me ask just this…exactly how many times have you ordered groceries from Amazon?

This is the kind of application that would make me do something I wasn’t doing before, just so I could use the tasty interface. Delicious Library had that feel about it, and so does this. I fell for the level of detail and thought that’s gone into this. The way the notes field is differentiated but not too attention-grabbing. Everything was laid out in such an intuitive way - I knew that I could use this without wondering where to find a certain function. I saw that there was a share function, but didn’t see any information on how this worked. I would expect sharing over Bonjour, which would work similiar to iTunes and iPhoto shared libraries, but how about by email? If recipe cards could be developed to some kind of open standard (http://microformats.org/wiki/recipe-examples) so much the better.

The meal planning/grocery list idea was well executed, even though this felt too regimented for me to use in real life.

Beautiful design. I’m just a little concerned that few people in the real world cook like this. It takes a highly organized, dedicated person to do this.

i don’t get it. these apps have been around for years and i’ve never understood them since i see such marginal value beyond a traditional cookbook. the application is well thought through and the mock-ups illustrate most of the core scenarios – it was very easy to get a feel for the app and it is a well designed ux. i simply question the need for a cookbook application with so many cooking and recipe websites on the internet that can satisfy most of what you’re trying to do here. given that this concept made it to the finals, i could be offbase since a lot of people voted for it – perhaps i’m just too far away from the target to be objective (i can’t imagine scheduling out meals a month in advance). i did look for the one feature that would help me the most — selecting a list of stuff from my closet/fridge and pressing the “find me something more creative than pb&j with this”

One feature I’d like to see in Cookbook’s meal planner: Calorie and carb counting or calculation. As a diabetic it’s important for me to keep track of such things, and it’d be really great to have an application where I could say “I’d like to prepare a meal with this value,” and have it come up with a list of possibilities — this for a salad, this for an entree, this for dessert.

Back in the mid-’90s I used Upstill Software’s Mangia! recipe manager a whole bunch. Every few years I search for a good replacement, and come away disappointed by the collection of dull FileMaker databases that litter the landscape. So the first time I saw Cookbook, I was sold. I want — nay, I need an iApp for recipe management and storage! Let me make one big feature suggestion: Each recipe needs to include a record of every time you made a particular recipe, who ate it, and what went right (or wrong). And one feature of Mangia’s that I really enjoyed was the ability to browse by certain recipe types — the equivalent of Smart Recipe Collections? I’m a little less sold on the necessity of Amazon.com integration. Won’t most people prefer to patronize their local markets and buy fresh ingredients?

I like this. What about allowing my iSight to scan in food that I buy (keeping track of my available food inventory). Also, how about making it a social thing? Lets say this application connects to other Cookbook users suggesting recipes from their collections (based on what food I have available). Then you could also digg the best recipes.. hrmm.. : )

Cookbook is a great idea and one that is needed. Having voice recognition and utilizing a shopping list idea is great. Integrating Amazon is certainly a hot topic — I like what Jason Harris said about using shopping plug-ins and let the community build them. I wonder instead of actually buying the ingredients if you could just inventory the items you bought using iSight as a scanner.

Here we are 35 years into the personal-computer revolution, and we’re still talking about keeping our recipes on the thing?

Seriously, though, I love the Apple-esque goodness going on here. Clever use of Apple technologies and conventions. Exploiting the Front Row remote is pure genius. And the design is total kitchen-counter joy.

Except the part about dimming the screen when a dialog box is on the screen; I think that’s kind of pushy. Isn’t the Macintosh Way to eliminate modal dialog boxes whenever possible?

Also: The list of recipes needs some category system; otherwise, that scrolling list could get out of hand mighty fast. (It took Apple a couple versions of iPhoto to realize this and add folders to the Source list.)

Hey, I love to cook, but too many companies have foundered on this iceberg. It’s one of those applications everyone thinks they want, but nobody uses. I do like the TV integration, though. If you could figure out how to turn the recipe into a cooking show I could watch while my order is automatically cooked and delivered to my door, then I might be interested.

Cookbook has gone from being an idea that I hated to one that I’d really love to see win. Michael’s shown that he’s totally into this and he continues to refine his idea.

One thing that I’m having a hard time getting past is the Amazon integration (or any store integration for that matter). I just fail to see how this would be useful to more than maybe seven people. Grocery shopping simply isn’t like book or CD buying. I could go into a 10 paragraph spiel of why this is but I’m assuming that it’s pretty obvious.

Considering the limited development resources we have to get the winning apps done, I strongly feel that shopping integration is a huge waste of resources. Just have the shopping list creation feature which would be useful to the majority of users.

There’s really nothing I can say about this one. It’s cooked and ready. The mockups are just awesome, basically usable as is, and ditto with the tech. It’s solid as hell and flashy as hell. I’m a fan.

I write this as a guy whose hobby is gourmet cooking — well, at my level of competence, maybe “edible cooking” would be more honest — so take my opinions with (cf. heh, heh, heh, above) a grain of salt: a) almost no one has a Mac in their kitchen — nor should they, as that would be a waste of money, b) the Web is a wonderful, wonderful source of a wide variety of recipes, c) no chef — or even cook — would ever “plan out meals months in advance,” since effective, delicious, affordable meals are planned on a daily basis, based upon what are the most fresh, attractive, and affordable items at your grocer, butcher, or fish monger should guide what you cook that evening.

Been looking for a good recipe manager for a long time, and this one would blow any of the ones I’ve tried out of the water. Seems to be really well thought out and I don’t see any glaring problems with the UI in the mockups. A lot of local grocery stores have online ordering available and it’d be nice to be able to go through them instead of amazon, but as long as it makes a grocery list for me, I’m happy!

Cookbook is a nice idea for an app, I could certainly see myself downloading it and installing it. That said, I think going with straight aqua just isn’t enough for this app. One idea that occurs to me is that you could go with a paper-themed aesthetic, or come up with great icons for the different ingredients or primary ingredients. Something like the instrument panel in GarageBand at the bottom, where you click off a few ingredients that you have and it will start to narrow down the recipes you can cook. Gorgeous food photos could make this app a lot more interesting.

So, I’d add a few more custom controls that fit within the Aqua universe but are still unique to your app. That’s part of the fun of designing these things!

As a bit of a chef myself (a Macbook Pro lives on my kitchen counter in support of this habit), I would have to say that this is the one concept I’m truly amazed it hasn’t been done already. Michael has taken a great deal of time to think this one through and it shows. Overall I think the app design is well laid out, but for those of us with dozens or even hundreds of recipes, it would be great if one could group recipes in the sidebar into (user-definable with a set of defaults) categories and subcategories via some sort of collapsible tree-view. I’m constantly nagged for recipes by friends, so I’d really like to see the ability to share recipes with individuals in one’s Address Book incorporated. I could also see a larger social aspect to this take off - what if the user could opt to submit a personal recipe to a central database (the Cookbook equivalent of the iTunes Store, but free to registered users) and search through and rate a repository of stored recipes contributed by the Cookbook user community. I also think more emphasis should be placed on grocery lists as opposed to online ingredient shopping as the only ingredients readily available online are dry goods and any good recipe is going to require a trip to the market or grocery store for fresh ingredients anyways. I’m also thinking there should almost be a ‘pantry’ category for the truly anal among us who would like to keep track of ingredients on hand (the ability to auto-fill grocery lists based on what’s missing would be nice as well), but maybe that’s asking a bit too much for version 1.0. There is some serious potential in this one.

I have absolutely nothing bad to say about this one at all, so instead, I’ll talk specifics. The idea of Amazon integration has been hotly debated on the topics. Most people seem to want some sort of shopping integration, but don’t want it to be Amazon. I like the idea of using plugins for shopping integration, so that the community can create them for their favorite e-tailers, but I’d also like My Dream App to get the referral fees from those plugins. :)

Any suggestions on reconciling the two?

The new round of mock-ups are pretty nice and are a selling point for the idea right away. It’s one of my favorite ideas in this contest. This time I would like to comment briefly on the grocery service feature. I don’t think that this feature is absolutely vital but it’s pretty cool and therefore it should be available all over the world. Cookbook should be extensible so that it could support different retailers. We don’t have amazon’s grocery service in germany, for example. But there are other companies and even small local retailers which offer these kind of services.

This idea is definitely growing on me. I didn’t like it much at first because I was stuck on the the idea of using it to buy groceries through Amazon or whatever. I still dislike the buying groceries thing, but getting past that small part of it, you can see that this is turning out to be a fantastic application. Moreover, Michael has proven to be a great contributor and I strongly feel that he’d be a great person to work with if he won. He’s shown that he has great vision and has some innovative ideas regarding UI design. I hope Micheal and Cookbook go far in the competition.

This sounds really handy to me. The idea of integration with a retail store is sweet. Also the ability to spit this info onto a Palm via something like SplashShopper would be cool.

I like this one a lot.

I’m sure the name will need to be changed, but I love the mockups of this app. It is certainly the most polished of all the entries. Now, I must confess that I am a fat man who is trying to lose some weight (18 pound so far!). The key to success, for me, is planning and scheduling both meals and food shopping. CookBook would really let me stop worrying what I am eating and focus on working out. I’m a big fan of this app.

Anyone want to write an app that will exercise for me?

Michael’s mockups are so good I’m tempted to just bite the bullet and hire him now to do UI design. The interface seems simple, but is actually extremely powerful. And even more importantly, there are all sorts of subtle clues telling the user where she is and where to go. Excellent UI all around.

Moreover, actually implementing Cookbook is relatively straightforward - there’s nothing particularly tricky about it as far as coding goes.

Nothing bad to say about this one.

Look at the beautiful mock-ups of this idea. They look great. I like the idea very much and I like cooking. It’s important that Cookbook isn’t totally focused on recipe management because that’s boring. Of course it does recipe management but above all it supports you preparing the meal. Full-screen mode, reading the recipe for you and reacting to voice commands, and timers for monitoring the cooking time are features which are of great use for this kind of app. The idea is very well thought-out and is now my favorite.

Cookbook is one of my favorite ideas currently. I could see this being a hit with college-aged people as well as the singles crowd. Especially when you live in a town that doesn’t offer much variety in ways of what restaurants are accessible, cooking your own food becomes a popular thought… but figuring out what and how to cook is another story altogether. Rather than having to search online, I could easily see Cookbook having a massive library of recipes that continues to grow every day with user input. The hard part would change from deciding what you want to eat for the 3rd time this week to which new recipe you want to give a shot. If the final product looks anything close to the current mockups, the app would be near-perfect. Michael has done a fantastic job at giving us a visual aid at what it could be, and that alone makes the idea very exciting. That, plus the power of social contribution (anything social seems to be a hit on the Internet these days), and it’s a heavy-hitter in this competition. I’d really like to see this incorporate a buddy list (or equivalent) feature that would allow you to suggest new recipes to your friends and vice versa. Or, have a random recipe given to you based on certain criteria (or completely randomly). I really like the built-in calendar to schedule what you want to eat so you can go to the store and get the essentials (or perhaps order from Amazon Grocery in time to have it shipped to you), and integrating with iCal and Google Calendar would be a nifty feature as well.

How can it be that a company with “delicious” right in its name, whose flagship product is a household organizer has not already created this application? For shame, Mr. Shipley.

I think the market for “household software” is severely untapped, especially by the top-tier developers. This application, done right, could be a big hit. I got hungry just reading about it. The technology isn’t fancy; with help from things like Core Data and WebKit there’d be a lot of time left over for polish.

Taking it one step further, add some P2P sharing, collaborative ratings, a “mothership” web site, and a Windows version of the client application and you have the next billion-dollar acquisition target. Granted, I just hand-waved a hell of a lot of work, but the potential is there.

If Cookbook stays a nice little local application, it could still be a success thanks to its low overhead and broad appeal. If it goes all Web 2.0 and somehow manages to rise above the noise before the bubble bursts (again), it could be so much more.

If you haven’t seen the mockups for Cookbook yet, go check it out now. No, really. Go ahead and do that now. I’ll wait.

It presents an attractive interface to all your recipes; it assists with the process of preparing them (with its timers and voice input); it understands that recipes evolve over time and makes it easy to share recipes with others; and it even helps with planning and ordering (with its grocery lists and calendar).

The concept has been very well spec’d out, which will make it much easier to implement.

This is one of those apps that you never think you’d get excited about… but with some of the features Michael is talking about, this could be the be all and end all of recipe/meal management on your Mac. iTV is bringing your mac to the living room so why can’t CookBook bring it to the kitchen?