Hey everyone! Cookbook has been progressing from behind closed doors for the last few months and we have some absolutely delicious material for you to check out. Before we get to that, though, we’d like to officially announce that Wolfgang Bartelme, the creator of the TextMate and iSnip icons, has been working closely with us on the application’s design and user experience. In case you’re wondering (and you’re probably not) iSnip was actually a project that I was involved in before AppZapper and it was a freeware semi-competitor to John’s iClip.
It’s worth noting that we have made same pretty drastic strides since the initial mockups by Michael. As you know from the last post, we’re going with a 3 column interface that will promote visual browsing. Likewise, the theme of the recipe view will actually change based on the kind of recipe you’re viewing. We’ve expanded this thinking to include a unique style for the app itself… which we feel encompasses a kitchen atmosphere very nicely while still proving to be neutral enough for the themed recipe view to not look out of place.
The interface and all graphics included are still under heavy development. This doesn’t represent the final version, and things will change down the road. We hope that the more conservative interface advocates among you look at this with an open mind. While we are creating a visually diverse and distinct app, the user experience is incredibly consistent and obvious for our audience.
Without further ado, here is where we are right now with Cookbook’s interface (click for larger):
There have obviously been a lot of visual evolution since the last post, so I won’t even try to go through all the details here. We’d love your feedback on how things are going and we ask that you please comments with your thoughts, suggestions, and death threats. Keep in mind that it’s all in progress so we’re not looking for small details, just general comments.
Here is a little chronological evolution of this stage of Cookbook starting from the last post to where we are now. You can see that we’ve made a lot of changes with everything since then. The Flickr page has a nice repository of even more mockups, so make sure you check it out (clicky):
Now we’re going to be working on some finishing touches of the UI, implementing it and make it feel great, and then moving onto the other parts of the app (shopping lists, full screen, timers, etc.) and giving each the same attention to detail that we did to the main browsing portion. I hope you like it (or at least respect what we’ve done) and that you look forward to our next update!
If you absolutely hate it and think things went potato overboard, well, here’s the next best thing.
Delish? digg it!
