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CZubrecki commented on Show HN: PurePlates – A Recipe Scraping iOS App   apps.apple.com/ca/app/pur... · Posted by u/CZubrecki
kjellsbells · a year ago
I'm a long time veteran cook. This may sound a little rough, but the most important feature, bar none, for me, is not getting the recipe in to a recipe app/site, but getting the recipes out.

All recipe apps have a finite lifetime far lower than the useful lifespan of the recipe collection. So, imagine a chef puts in the effort, over a few years, and builds up a corpus of a few hundred or thousand recipes. They expect to be able to take those recipes with them when they inevitably migrate to the next system.

Example: I got lucky with Pepperplate, in that they used sqlite under the hood, and there was a repo on github that could extract the recipes. By contrast, Cozi is a black hole, and I'm going to have to do brain surgery on my phone to figure out how it works.

Never again. I'm seriously thinking of building my own infrastructure in YAML/XML (recipe markup language?) to store the recipes in a standard schema, a LaTeX layer to optionally print the recipes on index cards to give to family members, and some sort of plugin-based extraction method for various websites. Its quite a grind.

CZubrecki · a year ago
This is great feedback! I will definitely add to my backlog a way to "export" recipes if user desires, where the user can export their recipes with all the information needed to put on a index card of uploaded to an external DB.
CZubrecki commented on Show HN: PurePlates – A Recipe Scraping iOS App   apps.apple.com/ca/app/pur... · Posted by u/CZubrecki
taw1285 · a year ago
Love it! It would be cool to be able to auto tag cuisine type. Did you use an LLM to scrape and parse receipt details?
CZubrecki · a year ago
Actually adding that as we speak! Categories, cuisine, dietary, etc. Yeah I am using OpenAI, I tested with Claude but it was actually less reliable. FWIW, I am extracting the HTML and doing some cleanup work for it before passing it to the LLM with instructions.
CZubrecki commented on Show HN: PurePlates – A Recipe Scraping iOS App   apps.apple.com/ca/app/pur... · Posted by u/CZubrecki
heisenzombie · a year ago
Is there a reason I have to sign up for an account?

The old-school reigning champ of this is the app “Paprika” which does a pretty great job of this sort of scraping, modifying, and saving recipes. I do think that Paprika is getting a little old and clunky around the edges so there could definitely be room for a fresh new upstart.

CZubrecki · a year ago
That is great to know, I will check "Paprika" out and hopefully be able to build on what they have a shed new light on the cooking/recipe game. The reason initially behind accounts was more so storing personal recipes per user. I am however looking into the anonymous sign in, which will not require any "sign up" and then can be converted if desired!

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KarmaCake day5April 24, 2023View Original