Sometime this summer, for my birthday, Yang decided he would write me a recipe saving web app. I’d been whining about my inability to remember good recipes and my apparent allergy to posting incomplete recipe blogposts for quite some time, and he took matters into his own hands. Thus YumBox version 1 was born!

Yumbox 1 had a very simple interface that allowed me to add a recipe or a link to a recipe and tag it. Really, that was mostly what I needed, but it was totally undesigned and a little non-intuitive. And it was missing some features that would have been nice to have, like picture uploading, shopping list creation, and appending notes to a recipe. So, without making it way too complicated, I thought it would be a fun project to try and interaction-design this thing to be a little bit awesomer.  (It’s kind of like cheating though, because I am not only my own client this time, I’m also my own entire userbase. I’m sure that will skew user testing results a bit. Just a bit.)

So that’s what we’ve been working on. With luck, in the near future, this will result in a few things:

• I will keep better records for my own future reference when I find a recipe I love/hate/caused to explode (and so will know why in the latter case)
• … but people will also get to see all of my recipes because Yumbox is unlocked and anyone can view what I’ve added.
• … so it’s like I blogged, but I don’t have to be all fancy-pants formal about it.

And in the slightly less near future, this may potentially result in:

• an iPhone-compatible mobile version of the site that I can take to the grocery store to shop with
• a full-fledged web app that others can sign up for and use if they, too, are like me and want to remember recipes but don’t want to join another more bloated, ad-choked recipe-managing community website

In the meantime, here are some screenshots!

Exquisite Telephone

… and it is a cross between the Dadaist parlor game Exquisite Corpse and the children’s game Telephone.

No there really is no point in it… at least practically speaking (but I donno, maybe you’ll find that it is (unintentially) a great way to beef up your grammar chops… tee hee). For me, though, this was a great way to get back into the world of web programming. Because I’m preparing to take on a much more massive and ambitious (at least for my sucky programming fu) project, involving Thank You cards and acts of kindness and eventually, an awe-inspiring web-based dynamically generated display of visual complexity… and I hope to have this ready in 2 months for inclusion in my grad school app.

I’ll write a longer blog later about this Thank You cards idea and how it came to be, but for now, dinner is calling. Yom yom yom.