When we launched Evernote Food a year ago, we had one goal in mind: to create the perfect app for remembering food experiences. And we did just that.
Since then, we’ve updated and improved the app dramatically, but something kept nagging at us. Evernote Food was great at capturing the grand finale of the meal—all the dishes, the people, the ambiance—but what about the inspiration? What about the process of discovering a recipe or choosing the restaurant? So we went back to the drawing board and rethought Evernote Food from scratch. The result is one the most beautiful, fun and complete food applications ever.
Say hello to the new Evernote Food 2.0, now available on iPhone, iPod Touch and for the first time, iPad!
Get Evernote Food 2.0 on the App Store »
From Soup to Nuts: The Complete Food Experience
A meal often starts hours, days, even weeks before you take your first bite. It begins as an idea that turns into a plan and finally an experience, which is exactly how Evernote Food is designed to work. When you first launch the app, you’re greeted with four options: Explore Recipes, My Cookbook, Restaurants, and My Meals.
On iPhone or iPod touch a simple swipe or tap of the header brings any section into full view, while on iPad, tap on a section and it beautifully unfolds to show you all of its content.
Let’s walk through each of the sections.
Explore Recipes
Explore Recipes is your starting point. Here, you swipe through tens of thousands of recipes from dozens of the best food blogs and websites. Tap on any recipe that strikes your fancy to load the blog right inside the app. If it’s the dish you want, then tap on the scissors to clip the recipe into your Evernote account along with any tags or notes that you’d like to add.
If you’re not in the browsing mood, then search through all the recipes. You can search by dish, ingredients and even by blog name. On iPad, tap on the magnifying glass and type in your search. The results will include any matching blog post and any items from your own account. It’s never been easier to find exactly what you’re craving.
Great for Publishers
One of the big considerations when building the app was to make it both great for users and content providers alike. That’s why we use Punchfork to collect the recipes and whenever a user chooses one, we drive them to the actual site where they can browse and discover everything that the site has to offer.
My Cookbook: A Recipe Collector’s Best Friend
If you’ve been using Evernote to store your recipes, then My Cookbook will blow you away. Every recipe you clip using Evernote Food is displayed right alongside all of the food you’ve ever saved to Evernote using a desktop Web Clipper. Just swipe or search to find what you’re looking for.
Create Your Own Recipes
To make the My Recipes section work, Evernote analyzes the text of each note in your account to identify the ones that are recipes (no special tags or notebooks necessary), while filtering out your travel itineraries and work projects. A really cool side benefit of this process is that you can now author recipes and Evernote Food will recognize them and magically display them next to everything you’ve clipped.
Your Shopping Buddy
Everything you do in Evernote Food is always in sync across your devices thanks to Evernote, which means that you can plan out a big dinner using Evernote Food on your iPad, then grab your iPhone and head to the store. Launch the app on your iPhone and use all the recipes as your shopping lists. Everything you need is in one place.
Your Cooking Companion
Once you’re back from the store, launch Evernote Food, set it on your counter and cook along with the recipe. We love using the app on an iPad or iPad Mini for this. Be sure to take photos and captions in the app as the dish comes together.
Discover Great Restaurants
With Evernote Food 2.0, we promise to inspire a full spectrum of food experiences: from recipes all the way to restaurants. The Restaurants section helps you discover new restaurants, add them to your list and then track where you’ve been, all in one place.
Lists and Maps. Near and Far.
Discovering a new restaurant to try couldn’t be easier. Simply tap in the search box and enter a name or cuisine type. You can then choose a location anywhere in the world or stay local by tapping on Current Location. The list and map will instantly update to show everything in the chosen area that matches the search along with great cuisine icons to help identify the restaurant type. Then, tap on a restaurant to see relevant details including address, cuisine, photos, and, in some cases, even a menu.
On iPad, the map and list are displayed side by side. On iPhone and iPod touch you can switch between the two by tapping on the icon in top right corner of the screen.
Plan Your Food Adventure
The middle tab of the Restaurant section is called Saved and it’s your restaurant to-do list. Make lists for your town or wherever travel takes you.
Your History
The right-most tab in the Restaurant section is for My Meals. It displays a list of every restaurant where you’ve created a Meal. Here, your entire Meal history is presented as a list and map for your currently-selected location. If you ever want to see where you ate on your last trip to Paris, simply launch this view. Then, tap on a listing to see what dishes you had.
My Meals
The first three sections are all about inspiration, the final section is where those inspirations become memories that you’ll treasure forever. We’ve turned the core feature that Evernote Food launched with a year ago into My Meals, and there’s a lot more to love about the updated functionality. We redesigned the look and feel to be cleaner with crisper navigation and a more attractive photo grid. Tap the plus to start capturing a new food experience.
Saving a Meal
Every aspect of creating a new Meal in Evernote Food is more beautiful than ever. The interface is more intuitive, the text is clearer, the map is larger, and the photos look gorgeous. Give your Meal a name, choose your location and start snapping photos. If you’re having a big multi-course meal, we recommend keeping the app in camera mode and just snapping a quick photo with each new dish. If you have food photos sitting in your Camera Roll, you can easily add those, too. Once you’re done, you’ll have a fantastic photo essay of every second. Don’t forget to take photos of the people you’re with too. Add some quick captions to the images, and you’re done.
You now have a perfectly preserved version of the Meal that you can relive and share with your friends over email, Twitter and Facebook.
Related Notes
At the bottom of your Meal, you’ll find a Related Notes section, which helps you discover other items in your account that are similar to the Meal you’re viewing. We base the relatedness on a variety of factors including cuisine, ingredients, titles, and more.
Your Food World
We’re really excited about Evernote Food 2.0. We’ve been using it internally and absolutely love the way a single app can be great for everything from cooking your grandma’s recipe to planning a dining tour of Tokyo. And this is only the beginning. We have lots more to come for Evernote Food, including an updated version for Android. Be sure to take a look at these useful resources.
We hope you like Evernote Food 2.0 as much as we do. Try it out and let us know what you think.
