Ramblings of a geek with a few hobbies…
Almost a year ago we purchased a Touchsmart PC by HP for our kitchen to run my recipe software, Chef. It has been a great addition to the kitchen and is a perfect match for the software.
HP recently revamped the machine with the latest model, and it looks pretty darn cool. If you’re looking for a computer to put into your kitchen, definitely take a look at the Touchsmart – then give Chef a try!
I just released the latest version, 1.3.20, tonight. A few new things include: recipe rating; cooking times; preparation times; better search capability; ingredient preparations; bug fixes; and more bug fixes.
If you’re a user, go upgrade! If you aren’t a user, give it a try!
And now it’s midnight, time for bed.
Just a few Chef notes…
A couple weeks ago I reported that I had gotten rid of SWREG in favor of E-Junkie with PayPal and Google Checkout. Since then I’ve processed a couple of orders successfully so it’s good to know I didn’t break anything. That’s always a concern of mine when I make changes like these, Murphy has proven to be an evil guy at precisely the wrong times.
Early last month I decided to give Download.com a try so I signed up and submitted Chef to be listed. So far it’s showing a whopping 53 downloads.
The past week has been pretty busy with bug fixes and other support things. Tomorrow night I’m going to try my hand at connecting to a customer’s PC to see if I can check on a problem they’re having. Since I haven’t done this before I decided to go with Fog Creek’s Copilot software to (hopefully) get us connected. I use their (great) FogBugz software for Chef and at work, so I have high expectations for Copilot.
I just posted 1.3.18 with the bug fixes from the past week.
I think that’s it!
A little over a year ago I posted about Payment Processors for taking payment for Chef. Shortly thereafter I went ahead and signed up and integrated with SWREG. Over the past year I have been pretty happy with them regarding the capabilities they provided, as well as their prices – I’ve been able to accept payments for Chef licenses and successfully ship new customers their registration keys without any intervention on my part.
So why Bye Bye SWREG? It has come to my attention that they have started doing some shady (at best) things. In short, they try to upsell my new customers into buying something unrelated to my software – that charges a $9-$10/month recurring fee. And they make it look like it’s me doing the selling. I’m ashamed to say that I learned of this just a few months ago but hadn’t gotten around to switching everything out to a competing service.
Well that changed this weekend. After some shopping around and some coding, I am now a (trial) user of E-Junkie and have accounts setup and working with both PayPal and Google Checkout. I hope that I’ve tested everything as thoroughly as I feel like I have and don’t delay getting any new Chef customers their registration keys!
SWREG and Digital River – goodbye and good riddance. You’ll be getting no more commission fees from me. To anyone using Digital River for eCommerce – I urge you to take your money elsewhere.
The big change in this release was the conversion over to a tag-based system for Categories (both Recipe Categories and Ingredient Categories). So now instead of going to a separate tab and drag-dropping a recipe into categories, you just type the categries in as a comma-separated list. For example: “eric’s favorites, desserts, chocolate” will put that recipe into 3 categories that you can then search by.
The recipe slide show was also updated to make it more usable. The ingredients are now shown all of the time alongside the directions, with the applicable ingredients highlighted for the current step.
And as usual there were bug fixes and other small changes here and there.
This is going to be fairly heavy on the tech side, so you’ve been warned…
A couple weeks ago I converted the Chef code to Visual Studio 2008 – not a new .net version, just upgraded the solution and project files to the new format so I could start using the new IDE. I ran into just one small problem that was easily fixed when the conversion ran, that being a namespace getting mangled in one of the .designer.cs files that kept the code from compiling clean. Like I said, no biggie.
With just over a day to go on the Poll to the right (The TV show ER: Should it stay or should it go?), it’s 8-3 in favor of getting rid of it! Too bad I don’t have any pull on the matter.
This weekend I’m hoping to get version 1.3 of Chef posted on the website. Ana has been running it for a week or so now, so I’ll do a bit more testing and get it released. Among other things I’ll post about later, I made a couple changes to the Recipe Slideshow feature and Ana now finds it as useful as I intended.
Related to Chef, this week I had a long conversation with David about my dread of doing marketing. He gave me a good outline on things I need to do to increase traffic and actually start doing some serious internet marketing, for which I’m very thankful. I’ve made some modifications to the main page, but there will need to be lots more I fear. I would appreciate any comments and suggestions on this topic…
Earlier this week I received a free copy of Microsoft’s Visual Studio 2008 by being an Action Pack subscriber and completing a short little web tutorial and quiz. I installed it last night and decided to get the Chef code/projects converted so I could start using it.
The usual project conversion wizard popped up as soon as I opened the solution and prompted me to upgrade it to the new VS08 format (still targeting .NET 2.0 though). When the wizard completed, however, I was getting a few compile errors in some of the WinForms designer files (.designer.cs). It was easy enough to fix, the conversion just messed up namespaces during process, which surprised me a little bit.
I haven’t spent much time actually developing in 08 yet, but now that I have Chef converted I’m going to stop using 2005 in favor of it. I’ll report any cool new features I run into.
Chef has a feature called Recipe Slideshows which allow you to view a recipe fullscreen in a PowerPoint-like format that’s much easier to read while you’re cooking than the small text of a cookbook, or the regular view of a recipe in Chef for that matter. I’ve had that feature around for a while, but I noticed that Ana never uses it!
Her main complaint was that the ingredients weren’t always displayed so she’d find herself constantly flipping between the directions and the ingredients, to the point where it was just much easier to deal with the small text of the regular recipe window. This past weekend I made a few changes – the ingredients are always displayed AND it highlights the ingredients that are used for the current step. Click for the full image:
This is going into version 1.3 with a few other enhancements and fixes due sometime in January or February.
Version 1.2 is now available; get the upgrade if you’re already a user, or give it a try for the first time!
This release contains a few bug fixes and enhancements as requested by users. The best new feature is Recipe Scaling, check it out.
Also along with this release is a modified installation procedure. Rather than having an enormous download upfront, which tends to scare people away, I wait to download the database engine until installation time. I know that’ll annoy some people, so I also have the full package built and ready for download too.
I spent a little bit of time making minor changes to the website. I’m not a good web designer so I realize it could look much better, but oh well 🙂
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