Mmm…food

Hey everyone,

Here’s the feature of the week, as promised: a rebuilt account screen.  While I don’t have a picture of the old one for comparison (woops!) let’s just say that this is a vast improvement.  Instead of one long, homogeneous form, account management is now broken out into individual topics, each with their own layout, explanation, and processing logic.  As a user, you get (or will get) a lot more context on how your account work and what the settings do; as a developer, I get the ability to easily extend the account screen to new topics (meal preferences, additional services like LiveJournal or Blogger, etc.) and simplify maintenance.

Go check it out: sign up for an account, add Twitter or Facebook, set up MMS or email.  Pretty neat.  Of course, you probably won’t use it too often: this one’s more about laying groundwork to expand the site in the future than it is about adding awesome new knobs and gears for you to play with.  Over the next weeks and months, when features like tracking and analyzing specific meal details, location, Facebook Connect for the iPhone, etc., this update will be paying off.  This work also generated some Facebook Connect/Rails code that I hope to expand to a real plugin sometime.

Also, I fixed a bug with Google Maps that prevented you from adding a location to a meal, and am at work on version 2.1 of Mealstrom: the iPhone App, available now in soft launch mode from the App Store.  It has two or three bugs that are mostly already fixed and will be pushed out with a prettier interface as soon as I can.  Once that’s done, it’s publicity time.

That’s it for this week — I’ll be dogsitting in Marin County this weekend without a computer, so no updates until the following weekend.  Between the iPhone update and some new Facebook integration, hopefully I can get two small updates out and stay on track.

Stay well and happy eating,

Alex

New Account Page

New Email and MMS Page

Hey everyone,

Unfortunately, I couldn’t quite finish this week’s feature of the week.  I’m very close to a complete rebuild of the account management and signup system (you can see the prototype below), but hit a few snags in final testing.  I’m hoping to get it done in the next day or two, and will post all the juicy details then. 

This is an appropriate time to introduce myself a little bit (not too much, since it’s a bit late and tomorrow’s Monday).  Hi everyone!  My name’s Alex, and I’ve been working on Mealstrom for about six months now alongside my day job as a software engineer at a San Francisco startup.  I put in as much spare time in nights and weekends as I can, which is also slightly more time than my husband would like.  I’ll be adding new features and fixing bugs pretty quickly, overall, but there’re going to be a few weeks with a few big projects that aren’t going to come in on time.  I love the project, though; I use Mealstrom every day and am really excited by all the things I have planned, so the improvements aren’t going to stop.

Hang on, let me know if you have any thoughts or ideas, and there’ll be a lot more to play with soon.

Have a great week and happy eating,

Alex

New Account page

This week, I’m glad to announce two new features:

• New graphics for the home page and for the iPhone app, and
• Submission of Mealstrom to the iTunes App Store!

I spent some time this week developing a new flow for the home page to replace the old text-based description of how Mealstrom works.  The site has gotten more complicated and powerful, and it was about time the home page reflected that with a cool image.  (I’d hoped to make this week’s feature a complete update of the site’s information, but have chosen to push the rest back to another week.)  You can check it out the home page.  In a subsequent feature, I’ll make each link clickable so you can learn the details about each step in the process.

(before)

(after)

Along similar lines, I built new graphics into the iPhone application.  Gone are the days of horrible black loading screens and Apple-released application backgrounds: say hello to some logo-inspired graphics featuring my IKEA-brand table, three utensils, and some strategically-placed lighting.  I haven’t rebuilt the iPhone page on mealstrom.com yet, but I will soon.  In the meanwhile, the change in the login page should give you a sense of the before-and-after.

And on a related note, I’ve submitted the application to the iTunes store!  It’s still very beta — stable, but not by any means done — but after a lot of thought I decided it was time to draw a line, call what I have now the core feature set, and publish.  (Otherwise, I’d just keep iterating and it would never get to Apple.)  It should take a week or two for approval, then the whole world can download and play with the project.  (I hope the world likes it!)  Keep your eyes peeled — I’ll post an update here once it’s approved.

In the process of readying the app for submission, I made a few critical improvements to how it talks to the website; those are going to be at the core of a subsequent feature of the week, one that will substantially improve the level of flexibility and customization of the application (and the website).  Other near-future projects include:

• Facebook Connect for the iPhone integration: this came out yesterday and I’m very excited to add it to the app.  Look for that over the next week.
• Implementation of a tabbed view for account management, and improved look and layout for tabs both there and in the profile.
• Updated informational pages on the home page centered around the new site flow image.

That’s it for this weekend — have a great week and happy eating!

Alex

I’m going to set a goal for the project to launch (and blog about) one new feature a week.  Sometimes they’ll be big features, other times they might just be a small tweak or backend improvement, but no matter what, at least one improvement a week.  This week’s new feature is profile tabs, driven by a request to have a way to see an individual user’s entire meal history.

By breaking out the profile into several specific sections (right now just an overview and the meal list), I can provide that info in a meaningful (if not yet formatted) way.  The tabs are fetched via AJAX as you request them and then cached them locally.  This is a broadly useful enhancement — once the tab switching has some decent formatting, I’m going to roll it out to user accounts as well to make it easy to manage your overall settings, email and MMS access, Facebook and Twitter linking, and some planned meal tracking options.

You can see the new profile view in any profile — for instance, http://www.mealstrom.com/user/profile/alex.

See you next week,

Alex

Info tab:

Meal list tab:

Hey friends and foodies,

I’m happy to announce that Mealstrom, my new meal blogging and sharing site, has reached beta.  Both the website and its associated iPhone app are now both stable enough and fully-featured enough for me to put them out there.  And what better time than hitting beta to publish an inaugural blog entry taking start of the project?

Without further ado, then:

Q: What is Mealstrom?
A: A meal blogging and sharing site; microblogging for meals.

Q: And what does “microblogging for meals” entail?
A: It’s tracing your life in food.  Meals are a big part of all our lives; the stories and pictures of those meals would make up a whole journal reflecting what we’ve done through where we ate.  Mealstrom is a bit like Twitter, but structured specifically for food; it’s a bit like Yelp, but about the meals you eat rather than reviews of the places you go.  Your posts can be anything from a simple “This is what I ate” and a single food photo to a photo spread and the story of your afternoon.

Q: Why should I use Mealstrom?
A: Because the idea clicks with you — if it doesn’t, that’s cool by me.  Mealstrom’s not the next big thing — just it’s a neat little tool for those of us who want to blog our meals.  If you do want to share your meals, head on over to mealstrom.com’s sign up page (with your Facebook account, if you want) and start posting meals.

Q: Why did you build Mealstrom?
A:  This all began in 2007: I started taking pictures of food because I started taking pictures of everything during a trip abroad.  (I wanted to capture everything I saw to show my then-boyfriend, now-husband, back at home.)  Once I came back, the food pictures were the ones that continued.  I’m not sure why, per se; I guess I just liked food — I was writing regularly on Yelp at the time — and meals were regular occurrences around which I built a habit.

Over the next year, I accumulated a lot of pictures that just sat there — organizing and uploading months of photos to Facebook takes way too much time and energy, after all.  I’d taken up programming again in 2008 and had gotten it in my head to build an iPhone app sometime, and one day in October I downloaded the iPhone SDK and just took the plunge.  I like food, I like programming, I want to learn, and I want my meal pictures to capture something of the story behind each meal, the what and where and with whom and the whys that created each photo.  After six months, I have a nicely working project and a product I use very day.  By using it to chronicle my meal stories, I even have a basic journal, something that captures the flavors of my life, which is a big win for someone unlikely to take up standard blogging.  Bonus points all around.

Q: So what I can I do with Mealstrom?
A: Great question!  I just happen to have a list right here.  As of today, 3/7/2009, Mealstrom is:

• A Rails-based website where you can submit and view meals.
• An iPhone app from which you can submit meals with pictures, locations, and descriptions.
• Email and MMS support for your meals, for those who aren’t blessed by Steve Jobs’ handiwork.
• Integrated with Facebook, so you can log in, share your meals with your friends, and post comments.
• Integrated with Twitter, so you can tweet your meals to your feed.
• Integrated with Google Maps, so you can plot a visual spread of where you’ve eaten.

Q:  Wow, sounds great.  I’ll probably give a try.  What else are you thinking about doing with it?
A: Here’s what I’ve been kicking around:

• Tighter Facebook integration
  • Tag people who are in your meals, with a simplified signup for those who respond with the notifications.
  • Create a tab for your Facebook profile that shows your recent meals, your map, and so on.
  • Interactive story publishing for meals entered on the website.
• Search your meals (descriptions)
• Create metrics
  • View charts, such as the distribution of the different meals you eat.
  • Add the ability to track whether meals are vegetarian, healthy, or other discrete (and hence chartable) criteria.
• Discrete locations — matching your description and GPS to a specific restaurant or site
• Enhance Mealstrom.com
  • Tab-based profile to view your overview/map, complete meal list, and charts and graphs.
  • Default location option for meals that don’t have GPS.
• LiveJournal and Blogger integration.
• Location privacy so you can obscure your meals to 100 feet or a mile or hide the map from public view.
• The ability to work on multiple meals on the iPhone, for when you haven’t finished entering lunch by dinner, but don’t want to lose the GPS or other info.

Q: I can’t wait to give it a try — I’m sure it all works great.  Smooth sailing ahead!
A: Umm….sure.  I’m kinda writing software, so you might want to keep an eye out for a few things.

• Sometimes the website seems to stall on loading, at least on my browser.
• The iPhone app <=> website communication needs some improvements so that an error in the website won’t mess up a meal on the iPhone.
• The iPhone app needs UI enhancements, in particular a better splash screen and background.
• The website account screen needs cleanup and organization, probably something similar to the tab approach I’ll take with the profile.
• The website needs a better interface for picture uploads and management.
• The website needs updated iPhone screenshots and some updated text/info all around.  (Such as this blog.)
• The iPhone app needs to be submitted to the App Store — it’s nearly ready.
• The website needs a forgotten password link, which some of you may need today.  (Email me if you want it reset in the meanwhile.)
• Since the service involves GPS locations, Mealstrom probably needs a basic Terms of Service agreement.
• The meal and meal edit screens need some behind-the-scenes improvement in layout to make them more flexible and compatible with different resolutions and browsers.
• The whole website needs IE/Chrome/Safari testing.
• The front page of the website needs a graphical map of how the service works, rather than the one-line text flow on there today.

Watch this blog — now that it exists, I’ll keep the blog up-to-date as the site evolves.  I’m also very excited to share some of the lessons I’ve learned the hard way dealing with some of the cool technology that’s gone into this site, so every so often I’ll be posting tech entries about Rails, Facebook, iPhone development, or whatever else I’m working.

Have a great weekend and happy eating!

Alex