I had more going on this week than I planned, so I didn’t get a chance to make any progress. I’m hoping to get things back in gear this coming week. I had a good amount of momentum going when I built the proof of concept app, but I need to rebuild that momentum for this version. At the very least, I’d like to get a marketing page up for MealMind even if I don’t make much progress on building the backend features.
I did start thinking about building the mobile app again though. I think one of the critical features as far as adoption goes is to get recipes into the system quick & easy. With the proof of concept, I have to type in each ingredient, break up the quantity, units, and description and all of that. I’m not even capturing the recipe steps in the proof of concept, so I have to augment it with the Paprika app on my iPhone. It’s funny, there are quite a few apps out there that are good at organizing recipes, showing cooking steps, and building shopping lists, but none of them do meal planning the way I want it done. All of these apps are basically little silos of data so there isn’t a great way to plugin to them so I can add just the meal planning side. To do meal planning, I have to rebuild everything else (recipes, shopping lists, etc) or the meal plans aren’t usable.
On that front, one of my goals for MealMind is to have an API so you can import/export data easily and other apps can build on top of it. If you just want to use it as a recipe database, it should be able to do that. The only catch with other apps using it is that the existing formats aren’t great for what MealMind needs once we get to some features down the line. That’s a ways off though, so I’m sure there will be lots of additional thought going into that over time.