May 3, 2011

For Christmas this past year I wanted to make gifts for my family using my web skills… what to do? I started thinking: my Mom, sister and sister-in-law all have iPads (I don’t), they love to cook (I do too). An idea dawned on me: why not make my own iPad recipe app where we can all contribute content? I surveyed the competition (or inspiration), grappled with web-app vs. native, brainstormed on features and came up with a plan. I decided on the web-app route to leverage my existing skill-set and get this thing done in a reasonable amount of time (I only had a month until Christmas at that point).

I refinined the experience to make our family web-app as useful as possible — I’m the only web developer in the group, so it was important that both the front-end and admin areas be intuitive and easy to use.

Version 1.0 of Spiceboard includes: (WP = Wordpress-specific)

• Media queries for portrait & landscape layout switching
• Custom tap-to-display navigation menu
• Custom fields for ingredients & preparation (WP)
• Multiple post thumbnails (WP)
• Apple bookmark icon
• Email notification when a new recipe is added (WP)
• Show/hide comments (WP)

Other ideas for the project:

• Custom inline comment plugin similar to Soundcloud that tags a specific part of a recipe (like writing in the margins of a cookbook)
• Swipe navigation, possibly via integration with Sencha Touch
• More content!