I’m still not quite done with this project. And since it is vacation time, I had some time to spend on it, leading to a release with some improvements that I’d like to present briefly.

One thing I noticed missing right away when I started to transcribe one of my mothers recipes was a segmented ingredients list. What I mean by that is the typical cake recipe that will say “For the dough…” “For the frosting…”

So I had to add support for this before I could continue with the recipe. The result looks like this:

Another weak point that became apparent was editing the ingredients on the edit page.  Initially, the ingredients list was just a plain text field. The previous release changed this to a list view, but the editing support consisted just of a popover with plain entries to add a new row.

This turned out to be hard to get right, and I had to go back to the designers (thanks, Jakub and Elvin) to get some ideas.  I am reasonably happy with the end result. The popover now provides suggestions for both ingredients and units, while still allowing you to enter free-form text. And the same popover is now also available to edit existing ingredients:

Just in time for the Christmas release, I was reminded that we have a nice and simple solution for spell-checking in GTK+ applications now, with Sébastian Wilmet’s gspell library. So I quickly added spell-checking to the text fields in Recipes:

Lastly, not really a new feature or due to my efforts, but Recipes looks really good in dark as well.

Looking back at the goals that are listed on the design page for this application,  we are almost there:

• Find delicious food recipes to cook from all over the world
• Assist people with dietary restrictions
• Allow defining ingredient constraints
• Print recipes so I can pin them on my fridge
• Share recipes with my friends using e-mail

The one thing that is not covered yet  is sharing recipes by email. For that, we need work on the Flatpak side, to create a sharing portal that lets applications send email.

And for the first goal we really need your support – if you have been thinking about writing up one of your favorite recipes, the holiday season is the perfect opportunity to cook it again, take some pictures of the result and contribute your recipe!

It has been a few weeks since I’ve first talked about this new app that I’ve started to work on, GNOME recipes.

Since then, a few things have changed. We have a new details page, which makes better use of the available space with a 2 column layout.

Among the improved details here is a more elaborate ingredients list. Also new is the image viewer, which lets you cycle through the available photos for the recipe without getting in the way too much.

We also use a 2 column layout when editing a recipe now.

Most importantly, as you can see in these screenshots, we have received some contributed recipes. Thanks to everybody who has sent us one! If you haven’t yet, please do. You may win a prize, if we can work out the logistics 🙂

If you want to give recipes a try, the sources are here: https://git.gnome.org/browse/recipes/ and here is a recent Flatpak.

Update: With the just-released flatpak 0.8.0, installing the Flatpak from the .flatpakref file I linked above is as simple as this:

$ flatpak install --from https://raw.githubusercontent.com/alexlarsson/test-releases/master/gnome-recipes.flatpakref
read flatpak info from GTK_USE_PORTAL: network: 1 portal: 0
This application depends on runtimes from:
 http://sdk.gnome.org/repo/
Configure this as new remote 'gnome-1' [y/n]: y
Installing: org.gnome.Recipes/x86_64/master
Updating: org.gnome.Platform/x86_64/3.22 from gnome
No updates.
Updating: org.gnome.Platform.Locale/x86_64/3.22 from gnome
No updates.
Installing: org.gnome.Recipes/x86_64/master from org.gnome.Recipes-origin

1 delta parts, 5 loose fetched; 20053 KiB transferred in 8 seconds 
Installing: org.gnome.Recipes.Locale/x86_64/master from org.gnome.Recipes-origin

5 metadata, 1 content objects fetched; 1 KiB transferred in 0 seconds

GNOME needs a recipe app, since we all love to cook.This is not a new idea. Looking all the way back to 2007, the idea of a GNOME cook book already existed back then. For one reason or another, we never quite got there. But the idea has stuck around.

With the upcoming 20th birthday of GNOME next year, some of us thought that we should make another attempt at this application, maybe as a birthday gift to all of GNOME.

Shortly after GUADEC, I got my hands on some existing designs and started to toy around with implementing them over a few weekends and evenings. The screenshots in this post show how far I got since then.

Why did I start to write this app from scratch (instead of e.g. trying to give a face-lift to venerable gourmet)  ?

Beyond the obvious reason that I love to code as much as I love to cook, I wanted to give GNOME Builder a more serious test by starting an application from scratch. And I find it very useful to take a look at GTK+ from the application developer side, every now and then.  In both of these regards, the endeavor was already successful and has yielded improvements to both GNOME Builder and GTK+.  For the cooking part, you can judge that for yourself.

The main reason for writing this post is that we are at a point now where we need contributions to make progress. The idea is that we will include a decent set of recipes from GNOME contributors all over the world with the application.

Therefore, we need your recipes, ideally with good photos.

All the photos and text you see in the screenshots here are just test data that I’ve used during development, and need to be replaced with actual content.

So, how can you contribute your favorite recipes ?

Add your recipe to the app, and when you are satisfied with how it looks, you can use the Export button on the details page to create an archive with the recipe and related information, such as images. The archive also includes information about the author of the recipe (ie yourself), so make sure to provide some information for that in the Preferences dialog.

We just created a bugzilla project for recipes, so you can just attach the archive to a bug:

https://bugzilla.gnome.org/page.cgi?id=browse.html&product=recipes

Please make it clear in the bug that all the included images are your own and that we are allowed to ship it with the app.

Beyond recipes, there are plenty of other ways to contribute, of course. While I’ve tried hard to get many of the features in the initial design implemented, there is a lot more that can be done: for example, unit conversion, or a way to easily share recipes, or to print a shopping list.

Where do you get it ?

The project started out on github, but it is also available on git.gnome.org now. The design materials are collected on the GNOME wiki.

If you just want to try it out without building it yourself,  you can just use Flatpak:

flatpak install --from https://alexlarsson.github.io/test-releases/gnome-recipes.flatpakref

Of course, I did not get this far on my own. Thanks are due to several people. First and foremost, Emel Elvin Yıldız, for the designs and feedback on the implementation, Jakub Steiner for the icon and visuals, and Christian Hergert for keeping this idea alive and for making GNOME builder work great.