I just sent in more comments and feedback to the developer.
Initially, they had a very awkward search function. You could only search within a category. For example, you have to select a category, like dairy or pastries. Then you can filter based on how its tagged, i.e. meat, parve, dairy or beginner, intermediate, or hard. I didn't like that. I couldn't for example, find all meat recipes across all categories. I have to go into each individual one to search for that.
Also, we make a lot of references to other recipes within the app, and they're not always using english names, so it can be hard to find them. We want you to be able to type the name and then it'll find it for you or give you a list. We were not happy with the search function, so we paid a significant amount to have them work on this.
This has dragged on for almost 9 months now. We're getting very frustrated because the turn around is long. This time, we put down a deadline, we want it back by July 15th so we can submit it to the app store. We intend to have it launched and ready to go live on August 15th. Rosh Hashanah comes very early, so we want to launch it around the holiday and promote it like crazy between now and then.
We're told that its about 2-4 week turnaround time for the App Store to approve first time apps, which is why we want it there within the next couple weeks. Lets hope this time around its perfect! I feel like the design could be better, but the money isn't there to do that. I hope this makes us enough money so that we can pay for a significant upgrade in the capabilities of the app.
I'm just nervous, I feel like this is a project we've worked on for 18 months, and I hope it goes well. Don't want people to criticize it and give us bad ratings on the app store.
In the meantime, I've been posting several times a day on twitter and on facebook. Our numbers are slowly creeping up on facebook. We just passed 500 likes recently. But twitter has been stubbornly in the low 30s for weeks now. I know its cuz we didn't post much initially. I hope that once we go live, that will grow. I just have to keep plugging along there.
Showing posts with label kosher food. Show all posts
Showing posts with label kosher food. Show all posts
Wednesday, July 3, 2013
Friday, June 21, 2013
Sarina's Sephardic Cuisine - update
Finally got back the new version.
Not quite satisfied with it. They fixed a lot of the errors, but others are still there.
To be fixed:
Video. We have video of a lot of recipes, but they don't play in the app. We used Youtube to host the videos, but they're not playing. I tinkered with the settings on Youtube, i.e. instead of private, changed to unlisted and they still don't play. We have some videos as public but even those don't play in the app. Need to fix that.
Twitter/Facebook. We're not satisfied with how it interacts. We want the ability to customize the text posted for each recipe. I doubt we can do that, but we're working on this. If anybody has any suggestions of a good standard tweet/facebook post for this, please suggest it!
Search. This is a crucial aspect of the app. Right now, there is an extremely rudimentary filter function inside of each of the eight categories. This means you can search for meat or vegetarian inside of that category only. I can't search across all categories. I'd have to go into each category individually. Not a good idea. Also in many recipes we reference another recipe. It would be very difficult to find those if you couldn't search for it using the search function. And some of these recipes have hebrew or arabic names so it'd look like gibberish to someone who isn't used to that. A more robust search function is a must.
The developer said that they can't do that without upsetting the flow of the app and that they'd get to it in the next update after it went live. There won't be another update if we don't get it right now. I don't want to wake up to a wall of critical 1 star reviews on the App Store of customers complaining about the search function so we're going to insist on them improving it significantly.
Right now, I still think we're on track for release by Rosh Hashanah which comes super-early this year.
Not quite satisfied with it. They fixed a lot of the errors, but others are still there.
To be fixed:
Video. We have video of a lot of recipes, but they don't play in the app. We used Youtube to host the videos, but they're not playing. I tinkered with the settings on Youtube, i.e. instead of private, changed to unlisted and they still don't play. We have some videos as public but even those don't play in the app. Need to fix that.
Twitter/Facebook. We're not satisfied with how it interacts. We want the ability to customize the text posted for each recipe. I doubt we can do that, but we're working on this. If anybody has any suggestions of a good standard tweet/facebook post for this, please suggest it!
Search. This is a crucial aspect of the app. Right now, there is an extremely rudimentary filter function inside of each of the eight categories. This means you can search for meat or vegetarian inside of that category only. I can't search across all categories. I'd have to go into each category individually. Not a good idea. Also in many recipes we reference another recipe. It would be very difficult to find those if you couldn't search for it using the search function. And some of these recipes have hebrew or arabic names so it'd look like gibberish to someone who isn't used to that. A more robust search function is a must.
The developer said that they can't do that without upsetting the flow of the app and that they'd get to it in the next update after it went live. There won't be another update if we don't get it right now. I don't want to wake up to a wall of critical 1 star reviews on the App Store of customers complaining about the search function so we're going to insist on them improving it significantly.
Right now, I still think we're on track for release by Rosh Hashanah which comes super-early this year.
Sunday, June 9, 2013
Sarina's Sephardic Cuisine - part 7
I'd like to tell a story about how excellent a cook my mother, Sarina Roffe, is.
One day, a long time ago, I was bringing my girlfriend home (now ex-girlfriend) for the first time. I told her that my mother was an excellent cook. I even boasted that she was far better than her mother - despite the fact that I had never even met her mother, much less tasted her cooking. (Which was decent, but nowhere near as good as my mothers as I found out later.) I was backed up by years of praise from numerous friends so I felt confident in this boast.
Three days later, we drove home... And on the way home, my girlfriend agreed with me. My mother was by far the better cook compared to her mother, and it wasn't close. She also remarked that she was surprised that I wasn't overweight after eating that kind of food growing up.
If you ask any of my friends while growing up, all of them would agree that she was better than their own parents. An invitation to stay over at our house was treated as gold because it gave them an opportunity to eat a REAL meal, and not a TV dinner like some of my friends were treated to. Especially sought after was her chicken soup with matzoh balls which is a Friday night staple in our house.
And the scary thing is... HER mother, my Grandma Renee, might have been even better. Her Gefilte fish was mouthwatering. My mother still makes a mean one, but its not as good. Grandma has long since passed, in 1994, a week after I graduated from High School, but I still vividly remember it, and her chicken soup which was equally as good.
Which is why when my daughters say that they don't like her soup, I'm absolutely mortified! They had just loved it just last week, and now they're complaining about it??? I hope one day they will speak of her with reverence like I do about my grandmother.
One day, a long time ago, I was bringing my girlfriend home (now ex-girlfriend) for the first time. I told her that my mother was an excellent cook. I even boasted that she was far better than her mother - despite the fact that I had never even met her mother, much less tasted her cooking. (Which was decent, but nowhere near as good as my mothers as I found out later.) I was backed up by years of praise from numerous friends so I felt confident in this boast.
Three days later, we drove home... And on the way home, my girlfriend agreed with me. My mother was by far the better cook compared to her mother, and it wasn't close. She also remarked that she was surprised that I wasn't overweight after eating that kind of food growing up.
If you ask any of my friends while growing up, all of them would agree that she was better than their own parents. An invitation to stay over at our house was treated as gold because it gave them an opportunity to eat a REAL meal, and not a TV dinner like some of my friends were treated to. Especially sought after was her chicken soup with matzoh balls which is a Friday night staple in our house.
And the scary thing is... HER mother, my Grandma Renee, might have been even better. Her Gefilte fish was mouthwatering. My mother still makes a mean one, but its not as good. Grandma has long since passed, in 1994, a week after I graduated from High School, but I still vividly remember it, and her chicken soup which was equally as good.
Which is why when my daughters say that they don't like her soup, I'm absolutely mortified! They had just loved it just last week, and now they're complaining about it??? I hope one day they will speak of her with reverence like I do about my grandmother.
Friday, June 7, 2013
Sarina's Sephardic Cuisine app - part 6 - Beta testers
We just submitted our LONG list of fixes to our app developer. 28 action items. They haven't been good about fixing the simple things, so when we get it back, will have to check each of the 28 items to make sure it has been done.
On another note - I was reading around the internet and saw a good idea is to get beta testers to test the app out before it goes live.... So I'm asking all of you - the 20 or 30 people who probably read this, if you're interested in beta testing, please tweet, facebook, or email me and I'll put you on the list to beta test it. Should be ready in a couple weeks hopefully!
I have to figure out what criteria I need to look for.
Initially, I know I want to catch all the grammar/typos. Check every recipe to make sure there are no bugs. Make sure all the videos work and the pictures look decent.
Anything else I forgot? Let me know in the comments below or contact me via all the methods above.
On another note - I was reading around the internet and saw a good idea is to get beta testers to test the app out before it goes live.... So I'm asking all of you - the 20 or 30 people who probably read this, if you're interested in beta testing, please tweet, facebook, or email me and I'll put you on the list to beta test it. Should be ready in a couple weeks hopefully!
I have to figure out what criteria I need to look for.
Initially, I know I want to catch all the grammar/typos. Check every recipe to make sure there are no bugs. Make sure all the videos work and the pictures look decent.
Anything else I forgot? Let me know in the comments below or contact me via all the methods above.
Sarina's Sephardic Cuisine - part 5 - Video
This post will be a more general one about the app. There are many recipes that have been circulated among the Syrian Sephardic Community in Brooklyn, NY and Deal, NJ that have been handed down through multiple generations. However in todays times, our community has largely assimilated into society, and we've taken on a lot of American cuisine. The fear is that some of the recipes which have been handed down will be lost to history.
Another issue is that there are quite a few recipes that are notoriously difficult to write down. There are no real cookbooks that can demonstrate these recipes in a clear way for anybody to do. Most of these are handed down from mother to daughter. My great-grandmother, Esther Salem was illiterate, yet ran a big-time catering operation in her basement for many years. My mother would recount stories of times when my grandmother would drop her off for the afternoon and she'd give my mother some dough to try and shape into kibbe. While she's struggling with one piece for 15 or 20 minutes, my great-grandmother would make tray after tray of the same thing without much effort.
About 30 years ago, my mother decided to try and write the recipes down on paper as best as she could, so she sat down with her mother, Renee Missry. They cooked mainly by feel and taste, i.e. they'd taste it and see if it needed a bit more of this or that before proclaiming it a finished product.
However some recipes are art, and you can't make it by reading a recipe. You need to be shown how to do it, so that's where this app comes into play. We decided that we'd take video of a lot of these hard to make recipes and put it into the app so that the next generation of cooks can learn how to make these recipes rather than buying them at the local supermarket on Kings Highway or Avenue U. Store-bought kibbe just doesn't have the same flavor as the home-made kind.
For the most part, we think we have accomplished that. If you'll go to our website, you can see some videos we've taken introducing our app.
We've already put up some videos of some recipes we did on Youtube. You can check out our channel here.
Another issue is that there are quite a few recipes that are notoriously difficult to write down. There are no real cookbooks that can demonstrate these recipes in a clear way for anybody to do. Most of these are handed down from mother to daughter. My great-grandmother, Esther Salem was illiterate, yet ran a big-time catering operation in her basement for many years. My mother would recount stories of times when my grandmother would drop her off for the afternoon and she'd give my mother some dough to try and shape into kibbe. While she's struggling with one piece for 15 or 20 minutes, my great-grandmother would make tray after tray of the same thing without much effort.
About 30 years ago, my mother decided to try and write the recipes down on paper as best as she could, so she sat down with her mother, Renee Missry. They cooked mainly by feel and taste, i.e. they'd taste it and see if it needed a bit more of this or that before proclaiming it a finished product.
However some recipes are art, and you can't make it by reading a recipe. You need to be shown how to do it, so that's where this app comes into play. We decided that we'd take video of a lot of these hard to make recipes and put it into the app so that the next generation of cooks can learn how to make these recipes rather than buying them at the local supermarket on Kings Highway or Avenue U. Store-bought kibbe just doesn't have the same flavor as the home-made kind.
For the most part, we think we have accomplished that. If you'll go to our website, you can see some videos we've taken introducing our app.
We've already put up some videos of some recipes we did on Youtube. You can check out our channel here.
Thursday, June 6, 2013
Sarina's Sephardic Cuisine app - Part 4
We have 8 categories in the app, Salads, Soups, Sauces/Pickles, Vegetable/Rice Dishes, Hors d'oeuvre's, Dairy, Entree, and Pastries.
I'm currently halfway through the Sauces/Pickles. I've been checking every individual recipe, and tapping every button on each recipe to find errors. I've found numerous - mainly grammatical ones that we can easily fix in our interface. Others were more of to improve the look and feel of the app. For example, one feature we saw in other cookbook apps was that some had the directions in a list. Others had it step by step. We liked it step by step. If you were working on the recipe and then you had to look away to do a specific task, you'd have to look back at the recipe and then look to find your place in it before doing the next step. Thats hugely annoying isn't it? What we did was we broke it down into steps, so once you started - it'd show Step one is do this. When you're done, you tap a button and move on to step 2 and so on.
The developers we're working with aren't big on grammar, so we've been catching some grammatical/typo errors in the layout of the app. For example, we saw a pop up say "Plaese" instead of the correct "Please." I really hope that I'm not embarrassed by one that we missed when it goes live!
We did tap on two recipes and found that it crashed the app, so have to debug that. I have a LONG list - 21 items so far, of small fixes to do.
Here's a picture of the splash screen. Nice isn't it???
This screen shot is of the recipe. We're going to be removing the arrows on the sides of the steps to add 2 more numbers. You can swipe that bar back and forth. We're thinking about moving that bar down to the bottom. If anybody has any opinions on that, feel free to comment below. Also we found the text of the steps to be small and have asked them to increase the font size a couple levels.
This is the main screen where you can select the categories of the recipes we've curated for the app.
I'm currently halfway through the Sauces/Pickles. I've been checking every individual recipe, and tapping every button on each recipe to find errors. I've found numerous - mainly grammatical ones that we can easily fix in our interface. Others were more of to improve the look and feel of the app. For example, one feature we saw in other cookbook apps was that some had the directions in a list. Others had it step by step. We liked it step by step. If you were working on the recipe and then you had to look away to do a specific task, you'd have to look back at the recipe and then look to find your place in it before doing the next step. Thats hugely annoying isn't it? What we did was we broke it down into steps, so once you started - it'd show Step one is do this. When you're done, you tap a button and move on to step 2 and so on.
The developers we're working with aren't big on grammar, so we've been catching some grammatical/typo errors in the layout of the app. For example, we saw a pop up say "Plaese" instead of the correct "Please." I really hope that I'm not embarrassed by one that we missed when it goes live!
We did tap on two recipes and found that it crashed the app, so have to debug that. I have a LONG list - 21 items so far, of small fixes to do.
Wednesday, June 5, 2013
Sarina's Sephardic Cuisine app - part 3
In the meantime, while the recipes are uploading and we're working on various topics... I decided to start focusing on social media marketing to push the app. We never really felt like the app developer we're working with understood what we wanted to do with the share function which STILL doesn't work!
We want the ability to customize how the predetermined text will show up on twitter for each recipe rather than a canned post that changes the recipe title. And don't ask about Facebook. We're still working on that.
This is a crucial part of the app as we want to interact with all the people that download the app. We can't do that if this isn't working well, and this is probably the most important part of the app thus far. Anybody can develop a cookbook app. What we have going for us is social media and how we interact with the people who buy it. This is crucial for our success and if its not working well then it will fail.
While I don't expect this to be the next Angry Birds, we do believe we can make at the very least, our money back.
On another note... while we were working on this, we set up a facebook fan page to promote the app. We hit about 50 followers within a few weeks. But once we really got aggressive... we set up a facebook ads account, we really took off with followers. At this writing, we were at 409 followers within 14 days of doing the facebook ads.
We found that facebook ads is incredibly powerful in its targeting. You can target women aged 22-24 in so and so zip code that like to cook. Its amazing how specific you can get, with interests, age, gender, and location. And they'll tell you exactly how many people fit all of those criteria. Amazing in how they target... I highly recommend to anybody who wants to target to a unique niche.
We want the ability to customize how the predetermined text will show up on twitter for each recipe rather than a canned post that changes the recipe title. And don't ask about Facebook. We're still working on that.
This is a crucial part of the app as we want to interact with all the people that download the app. We can't do that if this isn't working well, and this is probably the most important part of the app thus far. Anybody can develop a cookbook app. What we have going for us is social media and how we interact with the people who buy it. This is crucial for our success and if its not working well then it will fail.
While I don't expect this to be the next Angry Birds, we do believe we can make at the very least, our money back.
On another note... while we were working on this, we set up a facebook fan page to promote the app. We hit about 50 followers within a few weeks. But once we really got aggressive... we set up a facebook ads account, we really took off with followers. At this writing, we were at 409 followers within 14 days of doing the facebook ads.
We found that facebook ads is incredibly powerful in its targeting. You can target women aged 22-24 in so and so zip code that like to cook. Its amazing how specific you can get, with interests, age, gender, and location. And they'll tell you exactly how many people fit all of those criteria. Amazing in how they target... I highly recommend to anybody who wants to target to a unique niche.
Sarina's Sephardic Cuisine - part 2
After the second developer was unable to deliver, we took a bit of time off and re-evaluated the whole plan. We decided to shell out significantly more money to hire a US based developer - who was referred to us by a friend. We committed to them several months ago.
The developer has worked pretty well so far, but we've had to make choices on priorities based on cost. We initially wanted to start out with an iPad version, and then do an iPhone later, but we switched that around as we felt that more people use an iPhone than an iPad. However our app is a Universal, so it would look the same on both.
The design is functional. Not elegant, but it gives you all the information you want. To make it real intuitive would have doubled the cost of the app so we had to leave out some things to get it to market sooner.
They set up an interface which would allow us to input all the recipes we have ourselves. Once we started doing that, we ran into several issues. For example, it didn't allow us to do recipes in stages. Some of our recipes require you to assemble 2 or 3 things separately and then put together into a finished product at the end, so each stage has its own recipe and directions.
Also, we found that we were unable to "save" pictures or videos that we put in, so that was a bug that had to be fixed.
These bugs were fixed and they added a mechanism to do multiple stages of recipes and then we finished the last few recipes and submitted to the developer so that they could add to the app.
The apps we've received for testing were decent, but didn't have our recipes preloaded until we got it this Monday. We'll be busy testing every recipe to make sure everything works and we've already found some errors that need to be fixed before we submit to Apple.
Stay tuned!
The developer has worked pretty well so far, but we've had to make choices on priorities based on cost. We initially wanted to start out with an iPad version, and then do an iPhone later, but we switched that around as we felt that more people use an iPhone than an iPad. However our app is a Universal, so it would look the same on both.
The design is functional. Not elegant, but it gives you all the information you want. To make it real intuitive would have doubled the cost of the app so we had to leave out some things to get it to market sooner.
They set up an interface which would allow us to input all the recipes we have ourselves. Once we started doing that, we ran into several issues. For example, it didn't allow us to do recipes in stages. Some of our recipes require you to assemble 2 or 3 things separately and then put together into a finished product at the end, so each stage has its own recipe and directions.
Also, we found that we were unable to "save" pictures or videos that we put in, so that was a bug that had to be fixed.
These bugs were fixed and they added a mechanism to do multiple stages of recipes and then we finished the last few recipes and submitted to the developer so that they could add to the app.
The apps we've received for testing were decent, but didn't have our recipes preloaded until we got it this Monday. We'll be busy testing every recipe to make sure everything works and we've already found some errors that need to be fixed before we submit to Apple.
Stay tuned!
Monday, June 3, 2013
Sarina's Sephardic Cuisine app
I'm writing this on my iPhone while waiting in the cell phone lot at JFK to pick up my mother.
About a year ago, my mother, who is very well known as an excellent cook, told me she was thinking about publishing a cookbook. I suggested that instead of a cookbook, why not make it into an app? I have several cooking apps, but the kosher apps are very weak, so thought this would be an easy thing to do.
She agreed and we started work on it. At the time, my mother gave me a very limited budget of $3,000 max. For a custom app, that basically leaves you with either outsourcing it to India or finding a college student to do it for you.
We tried the India route initially, but communication was terrible. They do know English, but there were frequent misunderstandings and "that's outside of the scope of work" comments. It taught me to be extremely specific and forced me to enunciate what I wanted to see.
When I work on stuff like this, I like to collaborate and have the product or service evolve based on feedback to the finished product. Often times I'll have an idea, but when I see it in practice, realize that it doesn't work. I found the 2 different India groups we tried out to be unable to work with this kind of feedback.
We then tried out a college student out of Canada, but he realized that he didn't have the time to work on this as he thought so we had to look for yet another developer.
To be continued...
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