Here Come The Tiny Apps
MINE
I use only a fraction of the apps on my iPhone. Of the 222 I have; I pretty much use 3 (twitter, instagram, and messages). These are single purpose apps for me. Twitter for news, Instagram for social and Messages for communication. This got me thinking that apps ought to be simple and single focused rather than overly bloated feature packed monstrosities like Facebook. They need to be TinyApps. If you can make a simple, single focused app that is intuitive, people will adopt it and use it frequently.
So I’m officially and boldly forecasting a Tiny Apps boom! And because I’m an app developer, I’m taking steps to test my theory on a number of simple, single-focused apps which require limited development resources and offer high-quality, an intuitive user-interface. First up: MINE.
My wife has been saving recipes for decades. They are mainly torn pages pulled from magazines and books with an occasional index card with a hand written recipe stained with ingredients from her dutiful, delicious service to our family. They are stashed into a bunch of folders with categorizations like Breakfast, Dinners, and Deserts. Secondary categories are things like “Yum” or “Add more curry” written on the page. When she wants to cook something she’ll pull the whole folder out and literally leaf through the hundred or so pages looking for the one she wants.
A while back she had the idea to make a recipe app. When I heard this I kind of chuckled; since back in 1994, when the internet was coming to be, one of the first applications people always talked about was how cool it would be to be able to store recipes and easily access them.
Well, now there are a zillion recipe apps but the problem is, none of the recipe apps contain her recipes. There are apps for virtually any kind of recipe/diet/fad/weight loss program you can imagine; Slow Carb, Keto, Paleo, Weight Watchers, etc. She doesn’t want those, she wants her mom’s sexy egg casserole and GG’s meatball recipe, as she says I want “Mine.”
The goal was to build an app that works very simply and does one thing: Organizes recipes. We didn’t want to build an app that makes her enter the ingredients for the recipe, organize a shopping list for those ingredients, makes her associate the recipe with categories, diets, calorie counts and has a whole bunch of tenuously related social media followers and friend information. We wanted to make it so she can cook that yummy carnitas taco recipe she’s had for 15 years. Just ask and it’s there.
Building a simple app also requires that the app is simple and intuitive to use. Otherwise, it’s a non-starter.
Here’s what we built:
- Scan a picture of your recipe, from a book, magazine, index card, wherever you have it. The app will help you frame and scan it.
- Compose a thumbnail for the recipe by positioning the image you want in the thumbnail frame.
- Give it a title and tags. Tags are the ‘secret sauce’ of this app! Use multiple tags to create the categories and subcategories that make sense to you (i.e. Dinner, Lunch, Chicken, Paleo, family recipes, favorite, etc.).
- Upload.
To browse or retrieve a recipe, simply type the title or tags. Or, better yet, use the text-to-voice feature by tapping the microphone and saying the title or tags, like “Chicken carnitas Yum”.
BOOM!
Dinner. Is. Served.
That’s MINE.
If you want to chat about MINE, or have ideas on #tinyapps or anything at all. Hit me up mark smillie
