Mmm…food

The enhancements announced a few days ago are now live on the main site (as well as on future.mealstrom.com).  I’ve been testing them for a week now, and while they’re still not perfect — in particular, there’s no note to tell you that the page is processing while it’s sending the form in the background — they’re solid and they’re a huge improvement over the old functionality.  Check them out!

Hey everyone,

It’s been a busy week here at Mealstrom!

Update 1: I’ve completely rebuilt the meal entry form.  In the clunky old form, you wrote your description and uploaded all the files together.  In this new one, each file starts uploading as soon as you add them, and when they finish, they’re set up on the screen for you to view and delete.  Less fuss, better look, less risk of writing a bunch and uploading some files and having the whole thing break down.  It’s a platform on which a lot will be built: sorting pictures, tagging friends, things I haven’t even thought of yet.

Update 2: But none of this is on the site, you say.  Where can I see this awesome new meal form?  On the new secondary site, of course!  I’ve created a new site called future.mealstrom.com where you can try out and test updates before they’re solid enough to go to the main site.  Everything there will be pretty stable — it’s how I’m posting my meals — but it may break occasionally.  Most of the site updates I’m doing now will live there first, so I encourage you to go check it out.

Update 3: New meal layout!  Slicker look and feel like the edit form, and with a huge improvement to viewing pictures.  Instead of loading huge files for buckets of scrolling, you get a gallery of thumbnails.  Want to see more?  Clicking on one, view them in a slick lightbox.  Soon enough, you’ll be able to see the friends you tagged, share the meal you’re looking at on Facebook or Twitter, etc.

Update 4: Share on Facebook for reals.  Up till now, it’s been sending everything through Facebook’s API (server-server communications).  That’s great, and it works, but with Facebook’s recent changes, those stories no longer go into the stream for your friends to see.  It’s been bugging me for a while.  To fix it, I’ve added Facebook popups to the site — when you post a meal, you’ll either get a popup (if you haven’t set Mealstrom to publish short stories automatically) or it’ll go straight to your profile (if you have).  Everyone will see them, cause your meals deserve to be seen.   (The Mealstrom iPhone app has the same issue, and a future update with Facebook Connect for the iPhone will fix that.)

Update 5: Finally, we’re still waiting on iPhone 1.1 — Apple kicked it back for a minor UI issue, now fixed, and it’s back in their court.  It should be in your hands within a week.  I’ll let you know.

Alright, that’s it.  Enjoy future.mealstrom.com, thanks for blogging, and happy eating!

Alex

New image upload and click-to-delete

Publishing to Facebook

New Meal Image Gallery

Hey everyone,

This week’s big feature, I’m happy to announce, is the submission of Mealstrom 1.1 for the iPhone to Apple.  This updated version — the first one I can truly call ready for the masses — fixes a number of glaring bugs with the original and also has a couple of enhancements:

• UI improvements: the UI (along with the rest of the program) was overhauled between the old alpha release and this post-beta version, but this version polishes it up quite a bit, from the fade effects on app load to the better look to some of the buttons.
• iPhone-based signup: the first release, sadly, didn’t give any of the users who downloaded Mealstrom from the App Store any way to sign up from their phone, short of navigating my iPhone-unfriendly site or waiting till they had a real machine in front of them.  I’m sure I lost users for deferring that feature.  No more!  When Apple approves this release, you’ll be able to sign up from your iPhone and be directed back to the app once you’ve finished the process.

In addition, I’ve also done a lot of preliminary work on rebuilding the meal entry and meal viewing pages on the website.  File upload is being segmented (a la Gmail before the snazzy progress meter); next I’ll be improving the whole layout and moving the images into a lightboxed gallery rather than loading them in their huge glory directly onto the meal.  The final segment in this rebuilding process is to integrate the new Facebook story publishing form and, for the first time, add the ability to tag our friends.  I don’t know how much I’ll get done this week, but I hope to roll out at least the file upload and lightboxed images by this update next week.

I know there’ve been a few bugs that some of you have found on the website.  Thanks for your emails as always; I’m going to put some better error monitoring in place so I can catch these quicker as well.  This is a small site run on the side, so there are bound to be bugs here and there.  Thank you for your patience — things will only get better.

Have a great week and happy eating!

Alex

Updated iPhone UI

iPhone Signup Form