News & Updates

News! Shock!

By chefs | Published November 27, 2011

The coverflow code previously mentioned is being polished. It’s really just a cute feature so I’m not pushing that code. As for iCloud and Core Data, well it’s probably best I don’t talk about that (see my personal blog). The short version is that the technology simply isn’t ready for a data driven application like Chef’s Book. If I re-architected the entire project away from Core Data and moved it into something resembling a document based architecture it would be grand I’m sure.

So instead I’ve focused on search functionality. This is working and currently the category table will search category names and descriptions. The recipes table will search all of the following:

Category Name
Category Description
Recipe Title
Recipe Description
Ingredients
Instruction Text

To search all recipes quickly use the All category.

What currently doesn’t work is searching for things like:

carrots and bacon

as it’s just a pure string literal search. Once I’ve implemented a more intelligent search i’ll look into getting the search to unify the results e.g. present both categories and recipes that match in a single table, see if that is an improvement and then release it.

Other work has been on moving some of the synchronisation code in background threads. With a view, if it’s efficient enough, to run the entire document sync system all the time in a background thread.

In other news, as expected with the release of iOS 5, I’ve had a few reports of people upgrading their phones and sadly losing their recipe archive. I cannot stress the following points enough:

  • Backup your recipes with itunes: Document Synchronisation Howto
  • When you upgrade iOS on your device, you can lose all your data; not limited to chef’s book. You shouldn’t but you can. Backup the phone with iTunes first and after upgrade if the phone is blank you can restore using iTunes. This will restore your data and won’t undo the upgrade. More Info**
  • Remember you can just email the odd recipe to yourself. This is something I do all the time as they end up staying on googles servers and I can just forward them to people.

** Sadly iTunes doesn’t seem to let you take a backup of phone to a named file so you can have multiple backups. Grrrr

Having said that, if you do find you’ve lost data and would like advice or help with Chef’s Book please email us support@chefs-book.com. I’m happy to advise, if you have a lot of recipes in some text based format and you’ve lost them on the iDevice contact me and I should be able to convert them into Chef’s Doc format for you. If enough people ask I’ll probably throw a small OSX based app out there to do it automagically, though I don’t have one written at the moment.

Posted in News | Tagged , , , , , | Comments Off
     

iCloud Support and Cover Flow Experiments

By chefs | Published October 12, 2011

Implementing iCloud support is proving to be interesting though progress is being made. I’m wanting to do it in a fashion that is stable, logical and provides people with the freedom to use it or not without compromising stability. As a way of distracting myself from that I decided to hack in coverflow support, which looks something like:

I like it, and since I got this far in a few hours work I’ll probably add the next logical steps:

- Decent rotate in/out.
- Title text underneath the recipes.
- Actually being able to click on a recipe to view it.
- Looping the flow so you can scroll round, and round, and round.

Posted in Development, News | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments Off
     

State of the Nation

By chefs | Published October 7, 2011

There’s been quite a lot going on in the background, two of which are of major significance. An advert supported version (Chef’s Book Free) working to my satisfaction. Rotations are messy with iAd and the ads all too easily diminish the user experience of the application. I will, in the future, consider a release that avoids iAd until such a time that it is updated to work with a split view style application in landscape mode. So that leads me onto other news, specifically the use of “in the future”.

I am now gainfully employed once again, for the first time in a while, so development has slowed although it won’t stop. I no longer have Monday to Friday 9-5 to work solely on this project. I would rather devote my time to bringing new features to the application (such as iCloud support for magic document syncing under iOS 5.0) than a free version that does not benefit my existing users.

The free version is however largely complete, bug free and frozen. All it needs for release is:

- Sufficient interest, so contact me via twitter (Personal or Chef’s Book) or email.
- Landscape iAd support.
- Features added to the paid application that distinguish it from free. So you’re getting major features for the upgrade.

So that’s on the back burner, the code is frozen so I’ll add new features and make another major release of the paid for Chef’s Book and then review where we stand with the free one.

Posted in News | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off
     

Update on free version of app.

By chefs | Published September 1, 2011

The ad free version is now complete being soak tested on the iPad. The iPhone version has been complete and working for almost a month. Adverts are mediated using the AdWhirl API and currently only feeding out iAd and Admob adverts. If no adverts are available or connectivity is limited an internal advert is used.

The iPad version had some issues due to the UISplitViewController as provided by apple and heavily used in the app not supported iAd adverts in landscape mode. I have a solution that not only works but is presentable and does not use any hidden methods or tricks that could cause it to fall foul of the submissions process. After a week or so of using it on the iPad I’ll be submitting it for review.

Any features added to the paid version will not find their way back to the free version, so it will act as a useful and functional demo. It will of course receive minor updates, bug fixes, UI improvements and other tweaks.

In other news there is significant progress on server-side code to support uploading, searching, and downloading of recipes. Although this feature making its way into working code is still some way off and a few other major features are required first, such as searching.

Posted in Development, News | Comments Off
     

Ad Supported Free version coming in a month.

By chefs | Published July 26, 2011

I’ve been working on an Ad supported version. The change in downloads after the launch of charged version makes me believe that an Advert supported version would work, not so much as a cash cow but as a driver for sales of the proper version. iPhone adverts are displayed at the bottom of the recipe & category tables, and the main recipe display. Adverts are not displayed on any of the other views, including the full photograph display. On the iPad it will be a large banner advert across the bottom of the main display window.

The code is written and being tested to ensure it doesn’t fall foul of the ad networks usage guidelines and that it doesn’t adversely affect other aspects of the Chef’s Book UI. After testing it will be at least 2 weeks until release as it will be a new app for submission and all that entails.

Posted in Development, News | Tagged , , , , , | Comments Off
     

Version 1.4 has been submitted to apple for review.

By chefs | Published July 8, 2011

It seems I have a habit of submitting updates on a Friday, judging from previous experience it will be live Thursday or Friday next week.

Posted in News | Tagged , , , | Comments Off
     

Chef’s Book – Help Files

By chefs | Published July 4, 2011

The next release will now includes an in application help file. Assuming that 99.999% people who found something a bit confusing would not contact support, 3 people did make contact with interface questions which probably means a lot more people have similar questions and just haven’t asked them.
I did have this working as some nice css/html5 but then discovered it didn’t actually work on the iPhone and decided to make it a more traditional software manual for now, it doesn’t clutter the interface with help icons/overlays this way and there’s really not that much to know.
The biggest change in the new version is iTunes document sharing support. Apple advise applications do not delete/manage files in the documents directory, obeying that rule and indeed the spirit in which it was made means that some behaviour can seem a little odd at first. I’ll be updating the FAQ page shortly after release with more details, and the in application help mentions it in some detail.

Posted in News | Tagged , | Comments Off
     

Design/Implementation of document support finalized.

By chefs | Published June 18, 2011

The implementation of document support has gone through testing and passed without any problems, then came the arduous task of finding an appropriate location for the button. I’ve settled on it being on the first screen next to the add category button. The icon I settled on was two circular arrows, subtly different to the iOS standard reload icon and similar to the apple mobile me sync button. Hopefully its purpose is exemplified by the icon.

Recipes will be written out individually with their category information included. Files you add via iTunes are not deleted and are only be updated if the filename matches a recipe. This follows apples recommendations on document support, it’s up to the user to keep it tidy I guess. :P

Writing recipes out individually means that updating them is a shorter process compared to a whole category, so in a future update the whole process will be a background task. More ‘magical’ and intuitive if everything just works rather than having a button to click. The priority however is to give people a way to backup their data away from iTunes backups.

Posted in Development, News | Tagged , , , , | Comments Off
     

iOS 5, well that solves one problem!

By chefs | Published June 8, 2011

iCloud looks incredibly useful and I’ll certainly be looking to implement it, that kind of synchronising is exactly what I want Chef’s Book to do for those that own multiple devices. I can then concentrate on the other features such as in app search and online recipe upload/search/download.

After experimenting with some server-side code I do have a basic framework setup to allow for the uploading of recipes, the full functionality is a long way of but the proof of concept only took a day and that is very encouraging.

In other news I’ve had a brief break from development, freezing the code and simply using the software for a week. Everything in the development branch has proven pretty stable so I’m just making some minor UI changes, double checking the upgrade process is smooth across multiple devices and app versions (some have not yet upgraded to 1.3 so I need to test the 1.2 -> 1.4 path). I’ll then be packaging it up for the review process.

Posted in Development, News | Tagged , , , | Comments Off
     

iTunes Document Support in Testing

By chefs | Published May 17, 2011

So as of this morning I have a fully working fully featured build of iTunes document/synchronisation support working. It’s being tested between an iPad and iPhone. All should go well here as there isn’t any major new logic involved as all the groundwork was laid in version 1.3.

During testing it’s a new button in the ‘About’ screen. The actions it takes are:

- Scan all documents and import them using the same import logic as normal, e.g. recipes already present are simply ignored.
- Export all categories that have changed, including those changed due to the import step.

It’s a slightly brute force approach but allows for a lot of flexibility. No files are erased from the documents directory but after they have been imported you can erase individual recipes and any categories that are irrelevant from within iTunes. Deleting a file will not erase the data from the app.

Also fixed is the minor checksum bug that escaped in the previous update.

Posted in Development, News | Tagged , , , , | Comments Off
     

© 2010-2011 Paul Downs.