Pocket Recipes


Pocket Recipes was created with the Android SDK and is for Android Devices 4.0 and above (it works on Android 3.0 in the emulator but I haven’t had a chance to test it using a device). The IDE I used was Eclipse.

I enjoy cooking: I am awful at cooking, purely because I get the timings on everything wrong; things get overcooked, the bangers are cooked before the mash etc. If I followed a recipe I would need to set an alarm after every step to make sure I’m following it to the letter; if only there were an app on my phone which kept track of it for me!

For my mobile development assignment I decided to put together an application to do just that. Luckily we were given free rein to make what we wanted in terms of app, so I took the opportunity to make “Pocket Recipes”, a simple application allowing me to store and view recipes, with the addition to have a timer notify me at every step. My target audience were people who, like myself, weren’t great with times and cooking, perhaps they had other things to do and didn’t have time to keep track of each step. So I wanted to make sure the application was large, easy to look at and understand; but at the same time I didn’t want to exclude people who wanted a bit more information in it, therefore nutritional information can also be stored if you wish.

Pocket Recipes uses a SQLite database to store all the information for the recipes; each recipe can be modified, deleted and updated. Users can also add and append new recipes to be added (it originally comes with none). I tried to keep everything nice and large, and most importantly simple for my target audience.

The recipe view offers a bit more functionality, and the main mechanic of the application. From here we can view the recipes ingredients and instructions, nutritional information and use the timer. We can also hold down on the ingredient to Google it: the module wanted us to focus on using phone features so sometimes functionality takes president over HCI. The timer is a simple On / Off button on the right; turning it on triggers the first instruction to be timed; its uses androids “Timer” class so that we can have it run in another thread, this makes sure it can be run outside of the activity. When It gets to the first instruction, it sends the user a notification (it can vibrate or make a noise based on the options), and the next instruction is queued. It can then be turned off by pressing it again.

If I were to revisit it (which I may do over the summer) I wouldn’t mind being able to have a separate window for the timer, so that users could keep track of what was being timed; pause and continue timers; have different recipes running at once and building a recipe based on a timer (they add instructions as they go along). Other than this I would definitely like to make it a MySQL database, so that users can view recipes online, download and share them.


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