We are proud to announce that the free version of our app 42 Restaurants - 42 Restaurants Lite is now available in the App Store. (Open in iTunes) The application is a just a taster of the full version with 4 recipes from 4 incredible restaurants. For more information on the full version you can visit: www.42restaurants.com Otherwise, pick up the free version and let us know what you think. Bon Appetit!
Awesome!! I was waiting for this Edit: Hmmmm… tried out the app. I can agree that it is very nice looking, but the user interface seems a bit clunky. Sliding the recipe cards is not as snappy as the photos app. I would expect it to auto-snap onto recipes instead of allowing me to freely scroll it. The flipping animation of the cards is not very appealing. The metal bar on top disappears leaving a part of the bar to turn with the card and then it appears again. I find how the recipe cards switch focus as you slide them also very confusing somehow. When turning the view to portrait, some loading icon appears over a black background, inconsistent with what I thought was the theme of the app: recipe cards. The photos in the recipes can't be zoomed and turning the view from portrait or landscape makes them rotate in an awkward way The menu button in the recipe portrait view is too small. And tapping on the main view does not close the menu. I find myself consistently viewing the recipe list by mistake. I really think the app could use a little more polish for it's asking price. I'm going to hold off my purchase on this one.
Thanks so much for the feedback. It's really good to know what people find difficult or want in an application without them letting you know. Just one thing though. Your review was generally negative of our app, which is odd since we have had rave reviews from a number of people of the full version. We have also put a lot of long hours and hard work into it to ensure that it is the best it can be. Would it be possible to get some positive remarks? Or was it generally bad altogether? In other words - what did you like about the app? Also, bear in mind that this free version only has 4 recipes in it. Some things that would make the free version better would make the full version more difficult to use. For example, auto-snapping recipes while scrolling through them would make it very difficult to scroll through a number of recipes at once. We will however, look into the issues you have outlined and see how we can improve them to give a better app experience overall. If anyone else has any input, it would be great to hear from you. -Mike
Hi Michael, I apologize if my feedback came as overly negative. The good news is, the hard work you and your team has put into the app really shows. Many details like how the menu looks and how the recipes, and other descriptions present themselves are done quite well. The kind of recipes the app offers are also way above the standard of most, if not all other recipe apps. And of course, the app does look really beautiful My negative feedback is just that the app feels clunky (for me) and could use a little more polish. To be fair however, my negative feedback is pretty subjective. Regarding the auto-snap, I think it depends on the use-case. For me, I'm not trying to look at several recipes at once. Its not like my photos where I like to see how one photo sits among the rest or that I would want to have an overview of all the photos that I have. For the recipe cards, I think its more like cover flow: I want to skim through the recipe cards to choose one recipe of my liking. Unfortunately, it's quite inconvenient because as I scroll the cards, my eyes have to change focus all over the screen as well. It feels like trying to read text on a webpage while scrolling the page. In cover flow, I just have to stare at the center at the screen and skim, fluidly. Anyway, thanks for looking into my suggestions I'm definitely no expert in this. And of course, you have all users to think about. If they think its fine, then maybe everything is, and you shouldn't change a thing PS: I decided to buy the app in the end. I think the recipes are pretty good and I'm content with that Looking forward to future updates.
Okay. I just found a better analogy: the UI for switching / selecting tabs in Safari app. It scrolls smoothly but yet it gracefully snaps.
Hey Prab, Thanks for the feedback. I am glad you bought the app and like it. We are working hard to improve it and make it more slick from a user interface perspective. Our list of improvements is very long, but then a good iPhone developer should always have a long list of improvements as an app can never be perfect. The "recipe flow" component from a developer perspective is a UIScrollView and there is an option to turn on paging - the snapping effect you get in the photo browser and mobile Safari. The only problem with the UIScrollView is that it's not very customizable so we don't have a lot of control over how the component pages. We are looking into rewriting the whole recipe flow component, in any case, without using UIScrollView. The new component would use a lot less memory and be more customisable. I personally, would like the center recipe to enlarge slightly when it gets to the center of the screen and also scroll similarly to Apple's cover flow. In any case, I am glad you brought this to our attention. We are going to give it a higher priority.
Awesome!! I just followed 42restaurants on twitter. Can't wait for news on the updates Keep up the good work
