Reviews Category Archive

Improve your cooking experience with an app

26 Replies RonF

Having a tough time inside your kitchen? Cooking is not an easy task, especially for those who feel it is strenuous and time-consuming. Favorite Recipes is the app that changes those notions and adds a new dimension to the overall cooking experience.

Developed by CulinartMedia Inc. for iCook2day, Favorite Recipes has a bunch of delicious recipes with clear explanations on how to prepare the dishes. Their collection is divided into categories like soups, salads, seafoods etc. On choosing a particular recipe, you can easily add it to the menu list by checking the orange circle given alongside.

Favorite Recipes iPhone appPreparing a dish is really exciting as each recipe has awesome images and details like cooking time, preparation time and the level of difficulty. You can see the ingredients for each recipe and easily add them to your shopping cart by checking the required ingredients.

There is an option called ‘Serve‘ on the top right corner of the screen. It indicates the quantity of ingredients needed to cook a particular dish for a certain number of people. This ingredient calculator provides options to cook for only 4 or 6 people. It would have been good if there was more flexibility so that users could have a wider choice, may be from 2 to 10 people.

I also noticed that the app crashed in this particular area when I tapped the ‘Cancel‘ button.

The ‘Directions‘ tab gives you an explanation of the steps to be followed while cooking. You can see the text version in the landscape mode and text with associated images in the portrait mode, which is a cool idea from developers. The ‘Shopping List‘ is a convenient option to collect all the ingredients you need to purchase for different dishes. You could place your order via Email or take your list along with you when you go shopping. Ingredients which you already have at home can be easily removed from your list.

Favorite recipes iphone app shopping list‘Menu‘ option is similar to the add to favorites section, where you can add recipes to the menu thereby deciding on the dishes you will be cooking for the day. Apart from all these great features in the app, there is a collection of Chef Michael’s cooking videos! This section has a list of dishes with detailed videos on the making of each recipe. It’s quite less in number and I feel a version update with more new recipes and videos would be welcomed.

This app is well-designed with beautiful photos of finished recipes, high-quality videos and some interesting features. The developers should have kept the user’s perspective in mind while developing the app’s interface. Apart from some minor bugs like the app’s tendency to crash, Favorite Recipes is a much recommended one!

You can download the Favorite Recipes app here.

WorldCard Mobile business card scanner app review

36 Replies RonF

So do you deal with a lot of business cards? Do you have a Rolodex sitting pretty at your desk? Do you spend a lot of time browsing your card stack to find say, contact details of a nearby car mechanic, only to discover it later in your wallet? If yes, then you have got to buy the WorldCard Mobile app for iPhone.

WorldCard Mobile iPhone AppWorldCard Mobile, developed by PenPower Inc. is a business card scanner and management tool. All one has to do is point the camera and take a picture. The app scans the card using optical character recognition (OCR) to label all the fields of the business card and uploads them to the phone book. Now this is a time saver and a pretty nifty job from the developers, only I wish, I knew of this earlier.

Now all is not gold with the app. I tested about 20 different cards each with different styling, graphics and color combinations and would say almost 80% of the cards were recognized spot-on, except for a few that came with dark color schemes, uncommon names etc. needed manual re-entering.

Also, I noticed that the lighting of the environment in which the cards were captured also affected the recognition and would recommend doing your scans in a brightly lit-up room, when you capture cards using the app.

One more point to be talked about is the user interface of the app. A simpler easy-to-use user interface with intuitive help features will certainly take the app to the next level. The app has already won a lot of deserving accolades and a better UI will certainly prove to be fruitful.

Final thoughts are, if you deal with a lot of business cards, then this app is a must have. The app works great and is available for £3.99 in the iTunes store. You can download the WorldCard Mobile app from iTunes here. Go try it out and let know of your thoughts in the comments section.