Nonapkin, the iPhone app, is a photo-recipe based, mobile only social network. The app seems to have a good number of existing recipes on its network already created by users who are professional chefs and is available for you to browse through and try them out. Lets go through different aspects of the app one by one.
Features
Nonapkin at its core is a photo-recipe sharing social network. To get the most out of the app, you need to login with your facebook account. But even without that, you can just browse through all the recipes on their network. They have a brightly lit “Create a recipe” button at the bottom right of the home screen, tapping on which then takes you through well-designed screens which ask you to input different attributes of your recipe like name, tags, how many people it serves, how long it takes to cook and the list of ingredients required.
Then comes the actual recipe creation process which, for each step, requires you to click a photograph and enter a description. Once you finish all your steps, you can finally set a cover photo for your recipe and publish it. It would be nice if it allowed the users to input the ingredient name into the description (in any of the steps in the recipe) easily from a some sort of a list interface rather than having to type it out manually.
Each user has a profile page where you can tap the ‘follow’ button and get updates from them. It also lists recipes they have created, the ones they have in their favourites and some more info. Recipes from all the users you follow get listed on the ‘Friends’ tab in the home screen. Apart from this, you can also discover new recipes through the ‘spotlight’ and ‘popular’ sections or by directly using the ‘search’ box.
Browsing through recipes is simple, like going through pages of a book, each page has one step listed, with the picture on the top and description at the bottom. Also, the list of ingredients is available on every page as a pull-down menu. You can comment on the recipe and interact with the creator.
Finally there is a handy shopping list feature, which lets you add items manually or from the ingredients list of any recipe to it. You can mark them with a simple tap like any other check list. Both the shopping list and ingredient list lets you input quantities with units commonly used in the food recipes like teaspoons, pinches, cups, drops, grams, litres, gallons and a lot more.
Design
Visually, the app looks very neat and is elegantly designed. The use of the all-caps ‘naturally condensed’ long tall fonts at some places, like on the shopping list, ingredients list etc. might become an overkill due to slight readability issues. You can swipe right on the home screen to reveal the side bar with a beautiful folding cardboard animation, which begs to be checked out.
The Aviary photo editing SDK is integrated in the app and hence every photo clicked can be “filtered” and enhanced before it is uploaded. This is a smart decision, and will help users produce some mouth-watering food photography.
The ‘Friends section’ could use a default message to ask me to follow users and add them in that section, instead of presenting a blank screen. I was puzzled initially, as I expected my facebook friends who use the app to automatically appear in that section, but later figured out that friends is actually the list of people you follow inside the app, which most of you might not figure out without help.
Issues
Before I begin to complain, I need to make it clear that none of these are show-stoppers. They might annoy some of you at times, but should be okay for most of the users. The app has heavy client-server interaction issues. Many times it feels I am using a mobile site instead of an iPhone app due to the not-so-well-designed caching system. Be it while creating a recipe or while browsing one, I was frustrated by the slow loading of images. For example, when I tried to favorite a recipe, it took a few seconds on a fast connection to reflect on the interface, thus making me tap again, only to be removed from favorites again. I hope the developers are working on an update to resolve this.
Final words
Overall, the app definitely has the potential to make you try some of the recipes due to the clean presentation of recipes on the app. Often in the past, I have given up on cooking because the instructions were vague for beginners. But with a photo-based recipe system created by the community, such issues will become very less likely. Nonapkin is available FREE on the AppStore, which is a limited time sale.
Let’s get cooking!