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!