IK-Eat

Household meal planning and recipe management

The app is a household meal planner and recipe manager that enables you to store dishes in a database and to assign these to specific meals on specific days. The software tracks the assignments and organises the list of dishes so that you are reminded of items you have not eaten recently. Dishes can be categorised by the assignment of predefined and user-defined attributes (e.g. "Usually eaten for Lunch", "Don't plan for weekends", "Mother-in-law doesn't like this", "Only for dinner parties"), so that the list of suggestions can be restricted, by setting appropriate filters, to items relevant to the day and occasion you are planning.

The main displays are a monthly calendar, which provides an overview of the meals you have planned, and the dish list, which contains the list of items (dishes) you may like to eat, and shows when each dish was last eaten. Detailed displays for dishes, showing all assigned attributes and characteristics, and for a single day, showing all details of the menus for that day including any notes you may have made, are also available. You can attach notes to individual dishes and to the day-specific plan for meals (to note who came to dinner, for example).

The planning process can be configured to suit individual requirements. Up to seven meals per day can be defined (you can decide what you want to call them), with up to four courses per meal (also freely nameable). If fewer meals per day are defined - usually it will be two or three - the displays and dialogues are restricted to these. A basic system of categorisation is provided on installation. This can be extended as required - for instance, you can define "who likes what" categories, or price categories. Any categorisation that you define is automatically incorporated in the filter system, allowing queries such as "suggest all meals in my price category 'low' that I have not eaten for the last three weeks and to which no member of the the family is allergic".

Additionally, the software incorporates a recipe manager, so that recipes can be attached to dishes. Recipes can be imported as text files or can be created in the app using the editor functions provided. The recipe manager is intended as a convenient repository for use while preparing meals, and can also be used to prepare a shopping list - the ingredients from the recipes for meals planned on selected days can be passed to IK-Shop for checking against supplies and incorporation in the shopping list.

The app comes with preset data that can be installed if required to create a basic dish list with a few recipes. This is intended to simplify familiarisation with the app and enable its use without having to input personal meal data. The preset data can be edited and extended as necessary to conform to individual requirements. Note however, that the app is not intended as a ready-to-use "cookery book" - we expect users to enter their own data and store their own recipes.

The app can be installed on any number of Android devices. A functionally equivalent variant of the software is available as a PC application from the author's web site. Synchronisation of the data is provided through dropbox, using your personal dropbox account.

Provided you purchase a licence, the amount of data that can be handled is limited only by the available device capacity. For unlicensed software, the number of dishes and recipes that can be defined and the number of days that can be planned is limited to a data volume that should be adequate to enable you to evaluate the software. There are no functional restrictions in the unlicensed version.

The data base incorporates a backup system, so that a planning operation can easily be cancelled and restarted if required.

The app can be installed with either an English or German user interface.