Hungry? Yummly Has an iPad App for That
The Pandora of recipes is now available on Apple tablets.
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The recipe search engine Yummly just made dinner preparation that much simpler, with the launch of its iPad app. Yummly hopes that the redesigned app will become a constant kitchen companion for home cooking foodies.
Instead of simply converting the existing website into a tablet friendly format, the app has been built from the ground up in order take full advantage of the tablet's size and interface requirements. Still, it includes a number of features that have made the website a favorite of many cooks. These include a personalized feed of recipe recommendations and a smart search feature that filters by ingredients, prep time, diet, allergy, and taste, among others.
Users can also save and organize recipes in a digital recipe box that can sync with the companion iPhone app. Finally, the iPad app allows users to load up a number of recipes and switch between them on the fly, perfect for multi-course meals.
The site—which launched in 2010—aggregates online recipes and extracts the key elements of a recipe from web pages regardless of their structure or format. This information is then parsed into ingredient lines and normalized ingredient qualities. The system is also able to estimate nutritional information and flavor profiles based on the types and quantities of ingredients included in recipes.
Yummly uses a semantic search engine that can figure out what users are searching for, regardless of regional terminology. For example, searching for recipes using the South Asian word "brinjal" (aka eggplant) will bring up any and all eggplant recipes, regardless of the regional terminology used by their original authors.
Consumer market research group NPD has estimated that more and more Americans are choose to cook at home. With almost 30 million millennials now using recipes at least once a week, Yummly, with its well-timed move to the iPad, may be positioned as the de facto "recipe book" of a new generation of weekend chefs.
While no official announcements have been made, there are plans to bring the app to Android phones and tablets later this year.
Images: Yummly