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

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: