Show HN: RecipeWriter – An editor to write recipes

Re:Show HN: RecipeWriter – An editor to write recipes by bazzargh on Wednesday October 08, 2014 @10:48PM (#8430560)

Seconded. The parser is very odd; it turns 'a nice cream' into 'nice cream' but 'an ice cream' is left alone. Moving the sentence structure around doesn't scan right, eg

  Golden Rings 5
  Calling Birds 4
  French Hens 3
  Turtle Doves 2
  partridge in a pear tree

it's inconsistent, you have to retype things after correction to get something grammatical:

* '2 oz of butter' becomes 'butter 2 oz of'.

* '2 rashers of bacon' becomes 'rashers of bacon 2'.

it's wrong for some things, with apparently no workaround:

* 'five-spice powder' becomes 'spice powder five-'

* 'three cheese coleslaw' becomes 'cheese coleslaw three'

Apart from the last two - can't you just highlight the numbers without moving them?

Edited to add: looking at the way the recipes are presented on the site - with the quantities in a different column, rather than tagged on the end - makes me think that it would be clearer if it looked that way in the editor too, so you don't think of it as a sentence.

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Re:Show HN: RecipeWriter – An editor to write recipes by anandgrafiti on Wednesday October 08, 2014 @11:39PM (#8430699)

Sorry about that, We took a calculated call with the editor. For the consumer, a structured tabular view of ingredients make sense but for the author, the structured way of entering it in tables becomes a chore. This is the main problem with creating good recipes. So we try to hit a sweet spot, and bring up a bit of that desired structure the way we parse the ingredients.

The writer is learning continuously with more people using it, and we correcting the imperfections as we spot them. There is no end to the ways in which people may enter ingredients. Our bet is, once the user get to see how it is presented on the final output, the second time they will start visualising the way it needs to be entered. A bit of mutual learning. Meanwhile, we keep looking for patterns and keep correcting these rough edges.

Also there are tons of use cases that we try to solve here. For instance, people who have recipes stored on their personal Onenote/Evernotes accounts or blogs can simply copy/paste the ingredients and steps to the free form editor.This would not have been possible in a structured form.

http://raymondsfood.cucumbertown.com/ recreated around 100 recipes from his blog over a weekend using the editor! Sure, it could still render buggy, but it is possible to iron out the bugs with more data coming in and patterns detected.

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Re:Show HN: RecipeWriter – An editor to write recipes by bazzargh on Thursday October 09, 2014 @01:20AM (#8430936)

No need to apologise! I agree that trying to edit in tabular form would be worse than you have now; I was thinking of nudging the users towards the correct mental model purely by styling the divs that don't have the 'current' class.

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Re:Show HN: RecipeWriter – An editor to write recipes by anandgrafiti on Thursday October 09, 2014 @01:29AM (#8430950)

I get what you are saying. This is something we are yet to explore. The freeform content editable input mechanism that we use currently is far from perfect with several browser quirks. Added to the common use cases of selection, moving the caret with keyboard etc, it becomes tad more tedius. But it is something we are planning to invest more time on. Thanks a ton for the feedback.

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