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Next Steps for Foodie Moiety
Its exciting to have the application published here on foodiemoiety.com! There were many hurdles getting to this point and now that the initial release of the app is available to download and use I thought I would share some thoughts about where we are now and how we can improve things moving forward.
The mission statement of Foodie Moiety from the beginning has always been to make the process of cooking more efficient and enjoyable. We look forward to feedback from our users to improve on our effort to accomplish that. Please contact us with your suggestions/concerns at support@foodiemoiety.com . We would love to hear from you! Currently we have a very flexible tool that can be used to create recipes using text, markdown, images, and video. It can be used hands free when cooking, and collections of steps can be saved and re-used in different recipes to cut down on repetitive work. Those are the basic attributes of the application, but the companion website adds additional functionality that allows our users to submit recipes they create to the website to be shared with other users of the application. Accepted submissions are presented in the form of a blog post with a link to download the recipe file. So in addition to providing the application for personal use we are trying to build a community of recipe authors who are willing to share their work with other users. Posts on foodiemoiety.com will also include food/cooking related articles as we explore our passion for cooking and great food.
If you have started exploring the application we hope that you find it intuitive to use. If there are aspects of it that you find confusing that is something we surely want to know about. This is a recipe app after all and it needs to be easy to use. Here are a few things we are focusing on to improve the application going forward.
Book editing. Foodie Moiety currently allows users to create a “book” out of a collection of pre-existing recipes created with the app. This isn’t a printing feature. Its a way to create a digital book that can be opened in the app and present the user with a list of recipes they can open and use individually. The idea was one of the last features to be added to the app. Its functional, but as of right now there is no way to edit a completed book. So, for instance, if you want to remove or add a recipe you have to create the book over again. That is obviously not ideal. Although, its not as bad as it sounds either. Creating a book is really just about selecting a bunch of your recipe files to include, specifying categories those recipes should be organized under, and writing a foreword. Its a nice feature to have because it allows an author to create a collection of recipes and store them in one file that can be shared with friends or family or shared or sold on foodiemoiety.com. Still, the ability to edit the table of contents of the book and add and remove recipes is important and its right at the top of the list of improvements we intend to make. We considered delaying the publishing of the app until that work was done, but decided to make it available without that finishing touch so that we can start getting feedback from users. Fortunately, updates to the app are free after your initial purchase so this and other improvements will be available to everyone as soon as they are ready.
During routine testing some of our close group of users suggested that it might be a good idea to provide the ability for a video to start automatically when navigating to a new step in the recipe. Currently, the app has a pulsing play icon in the status bar at the bottom left and in the command bar in the top left to indicate that there is a video associated with this step that is available to view. We like the idea of starting a video automatically in certain situations. The idea is that the step would load with the ingredients and directions panes overlaying a playing video. In most cases video content will be short, and this is where we think this feature can shine. For instance, we like the idea of creating a short video where the focus of what is happening is on the left half of the video frame so that the user can see the ingredients and directions at the same time as they are viewing video content to the left. Another feature that fits well with this scenario is the ability to specify that the video should loop. We imagine something along the lines of a video describing how to shape and layout pretzel dough playing in a loop with the accompanying directions and ingredients overlaying the video frame on the right hand side. This feature will have to be configurable because we don’t want video to start automatically in every situation. That could quickly become annoying for longer videos of content that the user is already very familiar with.
Windows on ARM. Very soon Microsoft will be releasing new Windows machines that run on the ARM cpu architecture as opposed to X86/64. Fortunately, there will be an emulation layer built into Windows which allows X86/64 native apps to run on the ARM processor. However, apps compiled to run natively on ARM will perform better. So, this year we will be making the necessary adjustments to get the app to run on the ARM processor to support the new hardware coming from Microsoft. That work does not require a major rewrite of code so we expect to provide installers for ARM soon after the new machines arrive.
Cross Platform compatability. Once the above features are addressed the plan is to freeze feature development for the app and work on providing cross platform compatability. The application will continue to target the desktop environment because by its very nature it is designed to be used on a larger screen so that it can be viewed from a distance while busy with the cooking process. However, we can take advantage of the .Net Maui framework using either XAML or Blazor to refactor the code and allow it run on the Mac and possibly even Linux. The main focus will be to get Foodie Moiety running on the Mac since that is the next most popular desktop environment to Windows. The timeframe for that work is slated for 2025 and there is still some investigation to be done regarding how to preserve the existing code base while refactoring for multiple desktop environments. More to come on that process in the following months.
Those four features are what we are focusing on moving forward but of course bugs and application workflow are always the top priority so we appreciate any feedback you can provide. Check out our contact page for a list of email addresses you can use to share your thoughts on the application.
Thanks for trying Foodie Moiety. We can’t wait to see what you create with it!