Open Source Food: A Clean and Easy Recipe Application
This is the third review in our series on recipe applications. To read a primer on the topic with the common features of a recipe application, please see: Making It On Your Own; Web 2.0 Recipe Applications.
The first thing you notice with Open Source Food is the clean and modern design, bringing a high contrast layout with large, full pictures. Navigation is easy - links are quickly found, and the tab layout (Overview, Recipes, Voted, Following, People) lets users get to the area they want quickly. Keyword search is on the main page and the recipe tab will show suggestions.
Users that are eager to share their discoveries and tips can email, vote, and share with Open Source Food. You can follow other members of Open Source Food like you do in Twitter so that you can keep up with your favorite contributors. All of the your recipes, favorites, and slideshow widgets are accessible from the MyPage tab as are the users you are following.
One of the draws to online recipe applications is how easy it is discover new possibilities, and Open Source Food does this by rotating a random selection of recipes across the pages. Top recipes and recently popular ones have their own pages, and each search suggestions will of course show anything related to the search term. There could be more done to improve discovery with Open Source Food, to bring even more suggestions to users, but the ability is there - more than with conventional books - to spark your imagination. Recipes are searchable and tagged, and if you find a user you like, you can pull up their recipes through their page (ever contributor gets a page), and use RSS to be updated whenever they add a new recipe.
Open Source Food could also be improved with greater function around ingredients. Currently, users looking to match their ingredients to recipes can only search - which means that they can only search by one ingredient at a time. That said, Open Source Food is a quick way to find, discover, and share recipes.
To find this or other recipe applications, there is the Listio search: recipes+discover.
Previously in this series: Supercook: Recipes From What You Have
Next in this series: Foodari: Recipes With Full Function
Application: Open Source FoodListio Profile: http://www.listio.com/web20/app/Open-Source-Food/
Website: http://www.opensourcefood.com
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Tags: discover, find, personal, Recipes, share
Posted in: Recipes | Respond
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