Recipe Genie - a Unity made cooking app

Hello my name is Dex. I have been working on an app that I think is a really great idea. The app is called Recipe Genie. The basic idea is simple, take ingredients you have in your house and output recipes for the user to make. The thinking behind it is, I hate cooking and I hate trying to figure out what to cook even more. So I made this app to figure out what I can cook for me.

Setup is pretty simple, add ingredients from a huge database. Then presto, all the recipes you can make will output to the app.

And just like that, I never have to think about what to cook again. Recipe Genie has a good amount of features with more features mapped out for the future. Version 1.0 will come with the follow features.

*Personal pantry of ingredients
*Custom recipes made with your own ingredients
*Ability to sync your pantry from the web to your phone
*Create and upload your own personal recipes
*Upload any custom ingredient
*Keep track of all the recipes you like
*Grocery list of all ingredients you need to create a recipe
*Peace of mind never having to worry about cooking again

Recipe Genie will be 100% free of charge. You can sign up or login under guest. If you login under guest you have access to most of the app, the only thing you cannot do is create recipes or ingredients. Also, by signing up you can access your pantry list from all your devices(computer, phone, tablet).

Recipe Genie will have ads at the top of the screen to help generate some revenue. You can remove these ads and also unlock a ton of custom skins to change the layout and color scheme of the app for a small price.

We hope that you enjoy using Recipe Genie as much as we have while testing it. It has made cooking so simple and easy that I can just go to the store and buy random things and Recipe Genie will figure out what to make with it.

You can try Recipe Genie out right now by visiting:

TRY RECIPE GENIE HERE!​

Give it a try and let us know what you think!

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This is actually a pretty cool idea. This looks like it was intended for mobile devices, which will make it very convenient, although the text size looks like it might be a bit small for a phone currently.

 

I absolutely love cooking, but I also enjoy certain ingredients depending on my craving.

Just getting a general IDEA as to what I can cook, would allow me to make a masterpiece worthy of Homer's drool.

I'd love an app like this.

My only question is- What database of recipes does it pull from? A website? Google? A limited custom database full of too few recipes?
I'm most interested in that.

I am a great cook, and part of that requires having an extensive variety of recipes (from different cultures and locations) to get ideas from.

edit: Nevermind, it has lots of recipes. Although I couldn't find anything for Asparagus + Avocado, hahaha.
Unfortunately, google is better in at least THAT regard (Combining Asparagus and Avocado, lol).
Just to be clear, combining those ingredients was just a joke / test.
I still love this app so far, and will probably purchase it after testing it on a few meals.

 

Yes this is made for mobile devices but we also have a web version as well since Unity is awesome and allows us to port to all devices. In the future we might make a different web version and mobile version. The mobile version is still in development but we are getting some initial feedback before we go to mobile.

@CarterG81 - the app is going to be free with ads in it. You can pay a small price(maybe 3.99) to remove the ads and unlock different looking skins. The database of recipes are all manually put in as they need to be in a custom format to handle being able to take your panty items and convert them into recipes.

Thanks guy for taking the time to view the app so far.

 

I started to take a look and it wanted me to sign up and well not too much against that but I already have sssssoooo many usernames and passwords all over the internet....

Do you have your own dB? Or do you scrape? Custom entered recipes?

Look in your pantry and gather all ingredients to find one or two lacking and need substitutes? Can your app sub?

Look in your pantry and find you have only 1//2 the portion of a needed ingredient or a they want to make enough 1/2 as many or twice as many? Can your app recalc those measures on the fly?

Recipe is ready and served. Can you app give the nutritional information to those that track what they eat?

Can your app make subs for ingredients for vegetarians?

Can your app make subs for ingredients for allergy sufferers?

The diabetic?

And so on.

Programming software to create a modern cookbook can be far from being a dull thing.

As far as the recipes go I have a couple dozen cookbooks and I still use the web browser to try and look it up first than look in one of those book's index.

I think a lot of people would pay for a computer cookbook that was comprehensive in those things and had a lot of recipes. Plus allow people to enter personal recipes. I would.

The hard part is finding 'delicious' looking photographs of recipes that won't costs 10s of thousands but if you do the rest good I'm willing to bet you could get an SBA loan or the equivalent for your country.

Maybe there are web sites were people trade those pictures and recipes? I know there are many 'birder' and 'gardening' web sites where some quite nice pictures, information, and even seeds are traded.

There are some fitness SW / fitness sites / dieting sites with comprehensive nutritional information and much of that is user contributed. I have used CrossFit (out of Canada) since I'm not sure, early 2000s as a good example.

 

@goat - thanks for the feedback to answer some of your question...

There is a guest login button as well as the sign up page. The guest login allows you to use the app the same way. Using the guest though does limit some stuff such as cross sync to all your devices and allowing you to upload your own recipes/ingredients.

We have are own DB. Everything is manually entered in to ensure it works with the pantry manager to give you recipes you can make with what you have.

I think I know what you are asking, if their is an ingredient missing you can add your own. Just go under the settings tab, and add ingredient then reset the app and your ingredient will be added.(there will be a review process once the app goes live but for now it's fine)

Good question, as of now we don't have anything to recalculate the recipe if you want half or twice as much more. One of the people working on this with me suggested to put a serving size tab, so maybe that would fix the issue.

Short answer yes it should do this, long answer is...There would be a lot of information needed for each recipe to keep track of nutritional value. While I would love to have this in the app I think right now it would be a big under taking as it is just me and another working on it. Ive thought about giving each ingredient their own value and then auto making it depending on how much of the given ingredient is used but for right now it is just a wish.

This is a feature currently being mapped out aka not yet being worked on. I love the idea of people being able to eat the way they want to eat and not forcing the user to sort through the mess trying to find what they can eat. So yes this is definitely something that is being thought of.

As far as being able to input your own recipes in, the app can do that now. I know these kinds of things are a never ending process so why not get some help along the way. Getting people to help input their own recipes/ingredients is what is going to keep this alive and I can only hope I can get some very nice and generous people to help inputing this mile long list of recipes that we have. Thanks again goat for all the comment and feedback. Hopefully I answered your questions if not please feel free to ask more.

 

If this app picks up traction, I'd strongly recommend putting the database online, allowing users of the app to input their own recipes to a universal database.

This frees the developer from having to add an infinite number of recipes, but increases the awesomeness of both the app and the recipe database, using users who harness the power of collective work.

 

You need to be careful of redundancy though. It'll be hard to scroll through a list of recipes to try when there would be a block of 200 scrambled egg recipes to go through.

 

Allow them to upload recipe pictures too. If you add the calorie counter / nutrition counter and write the scripts to 'auto-populate' the recipes with that data it's be a big bonanza for those folk.

And lots of diabetics, fitness conscious, kosher, vegetarians, and others would like to have a regular old recipe book and the program 'auto-substitute' ingredients with appropriate similar tasting/textured ingredients according to their dietary restriction. This requires a lot of learning on you part and some programming to make it happen though.

If you want an example of a nutrition database that was original and then extended free by the users of the software visit this site:

http://www.crosstrainer.ca/

It's $39.95 :-( But I need to upgrade to 7 and it's only $19.95 Fitness folk don't have as much trouble selling SW as us poor mobile app developers. They've been around a while.

Also, I have a "Full Fitness" (used to be iFitness - no doubt some type of trademark problem) that has a good nutrition dB but it's not really comfortable to use extended periods of time on mobile devices.

Finally, here is a free nutrition db:

http://www.ars.usda.gov/Services/docs.htm?docid=23634

I tested your app and it's a good start but it needs to be more user friendly and concise. Spelling errors. The picture of the 15 minute calzone was too small. I have a small iPod Touch 4th Gen and a cheap wVGA Android after the new GUI comes out I can help you with layout of you like.

Also you can extend it with bar-code scanner for entering pantry items.

Making this top of the line is a lot of worth and work. I know of none that are so comprehensive if you included things suggested by me others above. If can enter recipes and test and test out some of the 'auto-substitutions'. I am vegetarian except I drink milk dairy products - although I'm getting stricter on that too. Calorie Counter and Nutrition Counter I can help test. Not implement, otherwise I'd do it myself with the new Unity GUI.

But it's a good ideal. Games are saturated and it's more work but using Unity to create apps like this is smart. It will be more practical now with the new GUI coming soon.

 

This is already in the app now. You can upload your own recipe and once you do I manually check it before it activates to prevent a huge mess. Allowing people to upload their own stuff will help cut down on our work with the end goal being the community runs the app(there is also going to be a report button to notify me when something is wrong)

 

Thanks goat for all the ideas and help. Yeah I am hoping the new GUI will be able to expand the current on instead of rewritting the old system. I'll keep this updating with what I am doing, now off to look at those sites.

 

Wow all this information is awesome and it's free! While this is a huge help the only problem is..there is too much lol. The goal is to keep to simple(ish). The database has over 15k ingredients in it. While it is nice to have everything, I feel having that big of a database is going to be too much and people will get frustrated trying to sort through the 25 different pork options. But this has helped me think of how I want to design the DB to handle nutrition and different food groups.

 

Well it's already in a database so it's there...I have other work though. Ciao

 

Version 0.57 is now up with it are a couple of new changes....

*New design for view recipes
*New init screen
*View all your uploaded recipes
*Themes
*Different settings page layout
*Fixed some graphical issues
*Bug fixes(standard lol)

Anymore feedback would be great guys! Thanks so far!

 

Version 0.571 is live.

*Some more bug fixes
*Improvements to the overall design
*Improvements to instructions

This will(should) be the last update before we start getting ready to push to mobile. The plan is too first release on iOS and gauge interest, then port to Android, Windows Phone, Blackberry and have then get an actual website in place.

Thanks so far for the feedback and help testing the site. I really do appreciate it.

 

I noticed it doesn't seem to sense my resolution properly so the webplayer version requires that I constantly scroll up or down to fit the GUI. This is a hassle.

Also, I entered a list of ingredients randomly. 5 or 6 items. Then went to recipes and it offered suggestions for things I didn't have ingredients for.

 

Yeah there is no update to the screen size. It get's the screen size from the start, i'll put something in there for the web version to update the screen size.

Edited: I just updated it to have some re-sizing updating. (Version 0.572)

 

I would definitely use this!

 

Thanks for the kind words!

 

New Design:




Old Design:




Messing with some new designs.

 

Like most recipe sites, this isn't a problem.

The list from top to bottom is based on certain variables, such as a rating system.

This way, users can fave and rate the best recipes. The ones that taste the best or are the most unique (and taste great) will make it to the top, while the 199 other scrambled egg recipes remain at the bottom.

 

Here is our new design for Recipe Genie.

 

Well after some long nights, I am finally ready to release this bad boy. I am thinking release will be 9/18/2014 or 9/11/2014. It will be free with ads, or you can pay a buck to remove them. It feels like this has been in development for years and I am finally seeing the light at the end of the tunnel. Be sure to play the lastest version on our website, I think it's version 0.62 or 0.63.

 

Hi, i am a student and had a same kind of apps in progress but i am a little lost for my final year project. Can i know where can I refer to do the same type of coding that similar with your apps? and can i email you for further questions?