February 2013 – Page 6

Food App Topics (Amira AP)

1. ) Ingredients Locator

When first moving to a new city or even trying a new dish it can be difficult knowing where to go to find unfamiliar ingredients. When my family moved from Bangkok to Atlanta locations of stores with asian goods were neither common or advertised. So one had to learn from word of mouth the locations of good stores to go to.My family and I would take an entire days traveling to multiple stores all over the area looking for specific ingredients. I found that I experienced something similar when moving to NYC. Although a lot of places are listed on the internet many are not and in order to find ingredients for Indian,Thai,Malay, etc the best source of info has still been asking around and getting “lost”. ( Some of the best finds are looking in a general neighborhood and stumbling across a tiny discreet shop).With this app one can search for locations of specific ingredients and addresses will shown via GPS. A stock selection of locations would be on the app and users would have access to the finds of others who utilize the app through crowd sourcing.

2.) Food as Remedies/Med

There exists an abundance of foods that can aid in boosting your body’s natural defenses.This app would be a companion for the naturalist and act as a reference guide to treating minor aliments at its source, battling health concerns from allergies to fatigue and headaches,blood pressure to arthritis…

3.)Butcher’s Apprentice (or Fishmongers Apprentice)

When buying ingredients for recipes I find that its a pain to look up basic info on identifying,choosing,and knowing was best to use for preparing when it comes to meats and seafood. This app would provide knowledge on how to choose meat and or fish,understanding how cut/prepare it,and giving tips on what is best used for. Also, I always feel nervous about basic equipment upkeep and this app would also give info on how to sharpen your tools.

4.) Don’t Mix It

With the increased prescription and use of medicines many are no aware of the potential problems could result from combining specific foods and drugs. Other combinations can enhance or decrease the effects of drugs. This would be a simple application to ensure that the user is properly informed and creating bad pairings of food and medicines.

Wireframing

Example (pdf)

Tools-

01/00 Project 1: Rough Concepts

1st Concept – Crusts Exchange
Target: Bread crusts lovers and those who do not
Description: A community of people to sell/buy/share bread crusts.
Why: Although it is a fact that bread crusts are rich in antioxidants and dietary fiber which help prevent cancer, some people just don’t want to eat them. Instead of throwing away, why not give them to those crust lovers and maybe gain some money back?

2nd Concept – Recipe Generator
Target: People who don’t know what to make out of what they have around the house (or want to eat certain things but don’t know how to cook them)
Description: Input a list of whatever ingredients you have and the app will generate recipes only with those ingredients for you e.g. bread, egg, butter -> french toast, fried egg, buttered bread.
Why: Usually, it takes quite some time for non-cooking experts to look for new recipes using their usual ingredients. A faster way could be to open a fridge, use the app, and cook right away.

3rd Concept – Find an M for M&M’s
Target: People who like to take photographs and play games
Description: Find an M in anything and take a photograph of it using a circular frame to create a digital M&M’s chocolate. Who has the most chocolates wins a prize of their own selected photograph printed on actual M&M’s chocolates.
Why: M&M’s is a fun brand that lets you print letters and images on their chocolates. This is a further step to make people realize that they can have fun with M&M’s anywhere anytime using a gamification method.

Yong Lee: Food App Ideas

App for recipes with close friends and family

I like cooking, but it is always challenge to try new recipes. My mom and some of my close friends have great recipes that I always ask. I easily forget the recipes I got from my close family and friends. I wish there is an app that where some of close people can share their recipes privately. There are a lot recipes I can find out online, but those recipes are generic and missing special ingredients. This app can help to archive some of recipes from grandmothers’ and share among close friends and family.

App for fresh ingredients and recommended cooking

There are always fresh and cheaper ingredients in a certain time of the year. I have learned that getting fresh ingredients is a big part of good cooking process. I haven’t seen any app that show what ingredients are fresh and cheaper at a certain time of the year. Also, based on those fresh ingredients, it would be great to show users recommended recipes that helps users to have diverse freshly cooked recipes.

Dieter Ramble | Perfect Pinch

Dieter Ramble

The app with working title as Dieter Ramble, is an app that basically is a dynamic recipe app for cooking by yourself.

Remember your grandmother’s cookbook? She spent most of her life raising children and grand children. And by the time that you just started to remember anything at all. Your favorite dishes, or your sibling’s or even your parents are all recorded in a hand written small book. That dynamic of trial and errors combined with love and absolutely a lot of time goes into curating those ingredient just for you. The taste to be called ‘home’.

Inspired by Flipboard, the recipe is not curated by the admin or need to search to specific menu by yourself but it will automatically curate the menu depends on user’s input of:

participants > who is eating? what are their feedback from last time? Oh this guy can’t handle spicy food? ok no more spicy next time he join us!
favorite dish and style > it can suggest similar menu and variation that you can try next time you cook.
local availability of the ingredient > you can input your local ingredients to the system so that it can take you to the menu that use those. it will also ask you to look for new ingredient every once in a while. so that your taste range expand.
nutrient > balance meal is hard to find on any cookbook, the app will help you consider if you have a main dish in mind what is the best/ easiest possible side dish to go along with it.
allergy > it can provide alternative ingredient/ menu that avoid using those ingredient that the participants allergic from so that they can have their meal with ease.

You can keep record and add feedback to your dish. Those review will go into account of which menu should it be for the next cooking session!

Perfect Pinch

Like in music, people with perfect pitch is those who are able to “know exactly” what the notes are as they hearing it. This app, perfect pinch, is an opensource community with an perfect tongue that can “know exactly” what goes into an elegant menu in front of them. Like wikipedia, this app allow the user to contribute their take on guessing, share their knowledge, discuss about what exactly goes into making chef-like menu.

The app is location-based and navigate by restaurant. Imagine the new restaurant open up at the corner of your street and then perfect pincher start to put up the whole menu on the site then deciphering each key ingredient and possible technique used on each menu. A lot of fun, isn’t it?

Each user will interact through scoring system, similar to what stackoverflow have. Those who are curious about how to make this menu better goes into this app and put the flag on the restaurant. Those who come up with the most voted answer get points. There is also achievement system coming with these points. more point, more respectful you are in the community.

Food App Ideas – Jason Kim

App Idea 1:

I remember when I first came to New York, I really had no idea how to order food. Back in South Korea, we would never have so many options. In Korea, whenever I went to a restaurant, or even a fast food restaurant, I would always order a set meal or a meal where I did not have to know every single ingredient. When I came to New York, it took me more than a year to order my first salad. In front of me was a whole selection of ingredients that I could put into my salad but I didn’t know most of their names. Even now, I still order them by saying “Can I have this, or can I have that.” I still really don’t know the different names of types of greens or cheese. I would love to design an aesthetic and informative app that will let people understand the different types of ingredients that go into a salad, a sandwich, or anything else. If I typed “Salad,” then I would get a selection of ingredients and also get tips for which ingredients would go well together. Maybe I’d also like to put different nutrition information for the different ingredients as well.

App Idea 2:

I enjoy cooking but sometimes when I want to cook something, I simply do not know where or how to start. There are millions of how-to instructions online but there isn’t really an app that teaches you in an intense step-by-step manner where one page of an app is literally dedicated to one step. I would like to design an app where it says something so obvious like “Step 1: Wash Carrots.” I think it will be playful and informative at the same time for absolute beginners. Along with providing a in-depth step by step method of cooking, I would also like to incorporate a stop watch that enables people to know when frying or boiling is complete. Although it may seem over-functional, people like me who need exact timing directions can use this app. There would be a timer that will indicate 6:00 minutes of boiling and an alarm will sound when the boiling is done.

Ramen timer App

As an example, I cook ramen a lot but it’s really time-wasting to stay in front of your boiling pot for six minutes doing nothing. And although you can see the clock, people are sometimes forgetful so an alarm may be useful.

SLATT: COOL APP

“Over” is an app that I admire purely for its beautiful design. The user interaction is in unison with the overall branding and identity with the use of an “O” as the wheel of options for the user. It provides the user with a small but beautiful type library to assist in adding text to their photos. Take a look. It is worth the $0.99 just to look at how it is designed, even if you don’t plan to use it.

SLATT: FOOD APP CONCEPTS

1. Fresh Direct + Whole Foods….So you are looking to cook a delicious meal for your family or group of friends, but you are nervous about cooking for a large group of people and you don’t have the time to coordinate a delicious and nutritious meal. Yet you want to prepare the meal yourself. You load the app and it is broken down into sections ie. international, mexican, 600cal or less, kids favs, etc. Within each category there are lists of different recipes that fit. You choose your meal and add it to your cart and pick your ideal time for delivery. Via Fresh Direct and Whole Foods, they deliver in conjunction with the actual recipe and the quantity of people in your dinner party. This way, you have a great meal by simply following the recipe within the app and not having to waste time at the store hunting down all of the ingredients and spices.

2. Quick Tricks: Pretty much all of the helpful hints I learned from my mother. This app would section out food type by meat, veggie, fruit, nut etc. Within each section there would be categories such as cutting, peeling, serving, preserving, etc. Here you would find quick tips, photos and potentially videos of the quick and easy ways to do things such as, dice and onion, cut and avocado, peel an orange, cut a tomato (so it won’t fall apart)…. all of the things that seem simple until you attempt to do them and end up cutting yourself and a mess.

Rough Ideas for Food App – Mani Nilchiani

1 – Some of us have the habit of letting the world know where we are and what we’re up too, more frequently than others. How do we achieve this? By “checking in” using the geolocation api. Either on facebook or foursquare, we leave footprints of where we are and what we are up too. The places we check into, are semantically defined in the databases used by such systems. So bars, restaurants, parks and schools are entities that tell us about the nature of the place we checked into. One idea could be tapping into this user behavior, and design and application that keeps track of all our checkins in restaurants, and based on our behavior and using machine learning algorithms finds ‘similar’ places we might be interested in trying out, taking the cognitive load of finding more of what we like off the user’s shoulders. Alternatively, the app could be set in a way that it suggests varieties. So if you are a huge fan of Chinese cousine, the app makes sure you get enough tempting suggestions of other cuisines to flavor up your eating habits!

2 – Eating is not all about taste. It’s also about atmosphere. If you care as much as the quality of food about the quality of the experience you get out of your visit to a restaurant, one idea could be an app that gradually gets to know your eating habits, urges you to quickly rate the overall eating experience / restaurant atmosphere and gradually builds a database of such user-generated content. If you’re a fan of a cosy low-light places with loung / jazz music going, or if you want to get energized while eating, and see lots of colors and upbeat music, this app makes it possible for you to navigate the food industry based on your other senses, not just taste!

3 – (in collaboration with Maya Weinstein, continuation of a previously prototyped web-app “idliketoeat”): Do you live your life with a dietary restriction? Do you look for Gluten-free food on the menus in the hope of finding variety while maintaining your diet? Are you looking for a super quick and easy way to spot Halal food? Is eating healthy all you care about at this moment, and you don’t have a lot of time browsing through a sea of options to find the food you want? idliketoeat is here to help. Focusing on spotting food based on dietary restrictions as the core functionality, idliketoeat makes is easier than ever to narrow down your food search. Spot the nearest vegan restaurants in one click, and spend your time enjoying the food that’s right for you, instead of clicking on confusing checkboxes and nested navigation menus. But that’s not all. While maintaining focus on dietary restriction as the primary filter for finding food, “idliketoeat” also gives you choices for various cuisines, when available.

Food App Ideas

1. Brainstorming food, having just spent Christmas with my family back home, the experience of feeding my young nieces came to mind. Every meal was a spectacle, a test of hand-eye coordination, with one hand attempted to empty spoonfuls of rice into their distracted mouths, and the other flailing to catch broccoli florets they catapulted across the room. I thought I could translate this domestic circus into a silly game involving finger-eye coordination. The aim of the game would be to feed the baby with one finger and catch flying food with the other (aiming to get more in the mouth than on the floor). Difficulty could be increased from level to level by introducing obstacles in the room making it harder to catch food, or requiring certain finger-gestures to feed the baby such as a zig-zag notion to imitate the aeroplane technique (“open wide, coming in for landing!”).

Image Credit - babymesses.com — Image Credit – babymesses.com

2. As an Aussie, one of the first things people often say to me upon learning this is “throw some shrimp on the barbie!” (For anyone interested, the phrase originates from a series of TV ads for Australian tourism starring Paul Hogan – aka Crocodile Dundee – where he says “I’ll slip an extra shrimp on the barbie for you.”) Again, I thought this could be a fun game, where you have to toss shrimp onto a barbie (before they go off in the heat), and take them off the barbie when they’re done (before they burn). Variables making the game harder could include keeping the shrimp away from the neighbour’s dog, catching the beer keg before it spills all over the food, stopping the hills hoist from swinging over the barbie and catching the washing alight, moving the barbie from falling drop bears (and countless other Aussie clichés).

3. On a more serious/practical note, I thought of an app that reveals chef secrets to loyal customers. My flatmate is a vegan, (which can be quite expensive), so she is constantly saying things to me like “I wish I knew how to make those vegan treats at the Bean”. Perhaps each user has a list of their top five favourite restaurants in the city (which can be edited at any point), and the further up the list, and the longer you have a restaurant on your list, the more perks you will get from them. Rewards could include cooking tips, season specials, recipes, coupons etc.