A few other outstanding issues were addressed, including:

• Recipe imports from Foodnetwork.com
• The option to turn off attributions in printed and emailed recipes
• Stability bugs squashed

An update to Cookbook+ is on the way which significantly improves the experience of recipe management. Here are the details:

1) The entire home screen view of recipes has been re-imagined to bring recipes to the fore even more than before, while deemphasizing UI eye candy. This new UI still uses the familiar recipe tiles but now employs a caching technique which lets you scroll endlessly vertically. Gone are the horizontal scrollers. These changes allow Cookbook+ to easily manage hundreds or thousands of recipes.

2) Filters. With so many recipes to manage you can now filter by course, cuisine, and dish types, and you can add your own categories to those lists.

3) Reduced footprint. We’ve optimized how photos are stored which greatly reduces the size of the recipe database, by about 80%

4) Newest Drobox SDK. We were using the most current code from Dropbox at the time Cookbook+ was shipped, but the code was still beta. Dropbox has since released a non-beta ‘release’ version of the code. So we implemented the new version which should solve some of the issues you’ve reported.

We’ve shipped the update to Apple so it should be showing up in iTunes shortly. Enjoy!

A recent post on this topic by Matt Gemmell, another iOS/Mac developer, has helped me to decide to just turn comments off. It’s a much more detailed read and one which I concur with for the most part. If you want to remark on an article then just put a link on your blog. If you need to contact me there’s a very simple contact form on this site.

Starting now, comments are off.

Yesterday’s announcement of Apple’s newest iteration of iOS, the software that powers iPhones and iPads, solidifies Apple’s dominance in mobile computing both now and into the future. iOS 5 adds more than 200 new features with many of those targeting how people want to use their devices and content. What really stands out when reviewing all those shiny new features is the sense that Apple is throwing all they have into iOS.

iPad is the now clear and dominate winner in tablet computing — there’s just nothing which offers the style, intuitive ease-of-use, access to rich native applications, and future utility as iPad. Many are coming around to the thinking that iPad can even be a complete desktop replacement. iOS 5 gets us one step closer to that goal.

The main new features which stand out to me as relevant in relation to Cookbook+ are iCloud, Twitter, and PC Free. Let’s look at these one-by-one.

PC Free

PC Free means we don’t need a PC, either a desktop or notebook computer, to get a new iPad up and running. With iOS 5 iPad can truly be a stand-alone device which will only increase demand. We’ve had so many requests to be able to import from desktop recipe software into Cookbook+ that I know there’s pent-up demand to get out from behind the computer and let it serve as a tool for our benefit rather than the home office desk we’re shackled to.

Our response is to put a top priority on supporting recipe import from a wide variety of sources.

iCloud

In a nutshell iCloud is a place to store your stuff. This is nothing new with even big name players such as Google Docs trying to be your repository of photos, documents, files, backups, or whatever stuff you need to store. But when was the last time you used Google Docs? Your answer may be the same as mine… never. There is however one cloud storage service which is massively popular and that is DropBox. Again, demand is there if execution is done right. From first looks iCloud looks to be done right. Simplicity, app integration, and it-just-works functionality are key to success.

Since iCloud is actually a revamped version of Apple’s long-existing MobileMe service it’s nothing new for them. Although MobileMe had some hiccups at the start Apple now has the experience and lessons-learned to make iCloud a seamless feature. How can we use iCloud to improve the user experience with Cookbook+?

Cookbook+ is badly in need of a good backup solution. After all, you don’t want to accidentally lose all those recipes you’ve typed by hand. Yes, there’s iTunes backups but that’s not very convenient and it’s easy to mess up. Up until now we’ve had two options to consider. One is backing up your recipes to your DropBox account. The second is using our own cloud sync services. The latter is actually built into Cookbook+ already (although you can’t access the button to use it) and how we stored recipes during the early development stages of Cookbook+. Since we don’t want to lock you into a particular service we’ll support both those options plus add a third option of backing up recipes to iCloud.

Twitter

Integration with Twitter means being able to tweet right from within many of Apple’s built-in apps such as Photos or Camera. This has significant implications. First, Apple isn’t building in Facebook support for whatever reasons. That act elevates Twitter to the predominant social media platform at least in the sphere of iPhones, iPads, and iMacs. But the spat last year between Adobe and Apple over the exclusion of support for Flash in iOS resulted in many media producers ramping up efforts to build HTML5 support into their content. Apple’s decisions can and do have industry wide effects.

We want social integration in Cookbook+ but with our limited resources, we are a small shop after all, choosing which new features to develop takes careful planning to get maximum benefit for our users. This means we’ll now be considering Twitter integration in Cookbook+ before taking on Facebook support.

iOS 5 is scheduled to ship sometime this fall and we’ll be ready with support for its new features.

The Turkish may be well known for their unique style of preparing coffee, Turkish coffee, but in reality tea is more popular in Turkey, and they’ve got a special technique for that also. The Turkish teapot works much like a double-boiler where boiling water in the bottom kettle heats the contents of the top kettle. The result is a steeping temperature just below boiling, and combined with a long steep time you get a very strong yet thoroughly delicious tea.

Here’s how to make tea using a Turkish teapot:

1. Put 5 heaping teaspoons of tea leaves, preferably black tea or just tea bags if you like, in the top kettle.
2. Fill the bottom kettle with cold water.
3. Add just enough cold water to the top kettle to moisten the tea, so that it steams while the bottom is boiling.
4. Place the whole thing on the stove and bring the bottom kettle to a boil.
5. Once you have a boil fill the top kettle to half full using the boiling water from the bottom kettle.
6. If the bottom kettle is a bit low on water now and in danger of going dry, fill it up again and bring to a boil. Let simmer about 10 more minutes.
7. The tea is now ready for pouring. Since the top is concentrated you’ll mix tea from the top kettle with hot water from the bottom kettle in your glass. The ratio should be about 1/3 to 1/4-cup of tea to hot water. Always have a spoon in your glass before pouring to prevent the glass from breaking.
8. Add sugar to taste and serve in a tulip shaped cup for a traditional Turkish experience.
9. Keep the kettle on a low simmer as long as you are drinking tea, replenishing the top kettle as needed.

Here’s a free wallpaper for your iPad. Taken by yours truly, this is a trusted photo which you can use knowing it’s from the original photographer. It’s been cropped to an ideal 1366×1024 pixels which allows for rotation while preserving the artistic intent of the scene in landscape orientation.

Click on the photo below to download. Enjoy!

Now that’s pretty cool but it probably uses some type of screen scraping which sort of works sometimes but not very well, right? Wrong. You see there’s a movement going on in the food tech world to adopt standards for sharing recipe snippets. Those standards are based on microformats which add additional tags to web pages to help identify the parts of the recipe, such as ingredients and instructions.

One of the more predominant recipe microformats is hRecipe, which is still a draft format but gaining wide adoption. We use hRecipe on our website and so do many others. So that’s how Cookbook+ imports recipes, even photos with the recipe. Back to the important qualifier draft. From our experience in tuning Cookbook+ to successfully import recipes from dozens of food blogs we discovered that hRecipe is loosely implemented in most cases and incorrectly in some.

Google to the rescue.

Recently Google introduced a new feature in their search results known as Google Recipe. They’re basically indexing the same microformats and organizing them into more relevant search results. If Google can’t read a recipe then it doesn’t get the special index. That should force webmasters to clean up their hRecipe (or other microformat) implementation.

This is all beneficial to both you and us, the users. Grabbing a great looking recipe to build a shopping list and try it out should be simple so we can get on with the good stuff, cooking and eating.

It’s been just about a week since Cookbook+ for iPad went live on the App Store and we’re already pushing out our next update. There were a lot of features we just couldn’t get ready in time to ship the first release so our plan is to incrementally introduce those features in successive versions.

Version 1.1 adds the ability to import recipes from top food websites into Cookbook+. That’s pretty liberating not to be tied to a single cookbook author’s recipes but to be able to pick and choose what you want. Right now we can import recipes from these sites:

• All recipes
• Betty Crocker
• Epicurious
• Food Network
• Martha Stewart
• And or course our own website Atebites.com

We can’t import from all websites just yet and sometimes you don’t get all the recipe details. We’re working on it though, tweaking the algorithms, improving read accuracy. Our goal is to be at least as good as Google Recipe, who themselves can’t always read snippets from web recipes. More to come so stay tuned…

Version 1.1 was shipped to Apple for approval. If there are no snags it should appear in the App Store in about a week.

After four months of development we’re pleased to announce our very first iPad cooking app is almost ready to ship. We’re calling it Cookbook+ and in just a few days we’re sending it to Apple for approval and expect to go live about the middle of May. We’re pricing this app at only $4.99 or about the price of a coffee and scone.

More details about Cookbook+ can be found on the product page here.