So I worked on mealplanner a bit more recently. But I mostly just added more tests and fixed a bunch of bugs the tests smoked out. Nothing particularly interesting (though I must say, tauri as it currently stands has quite a few weird little quirks), so I think now would be a good time for me to write about what mealplanner will do and why I decided to waste my free time building it.

From the name it’s pretty obvious what the intent of the app is, to let me plan my meals out. Specifically to let me pick from a repository of recipes I like once a week, have it generate a grocery list out of those recipes, and send those recipes to a grocery shopping service (I don’t drive).

Additionally, I want it to do calorie counting and nutritional analysis, and let me choose from old Plated recipes, since I found they’re almost always good when I used the service. And I want it to do all of this with as few clicks as possible; I want to spend as little time as possible doing this.

So that’s what it’ll do, as to why I’m going through the trouble of building it, well, there’s nothing that exists that does it. And without a tool like this, I end up eating stir-frys every day, or worse, getting takeout every day. (No offence to stir-frys, its just I’d love a bit more variety).

The only app I’ve seen that comes close is MyFitnessPal. It has most of the features above, it lets you add recipes and do nutritional analysis, but not much else. There’s no collection of reliably good recipes to choose from, and you still have to figure out what to buy by hand.

And on top of all that, the features it does have are truly poorly designed. It takes ages to enter new recipes in, and entering foods you’ve eaten can be an annoying experience too.

mealplanner, on the other hand, is going to be designed to be as streamlined an experience as possible. No context changes, little required interaction, and as little waiting as possible. I want to be able to go from no idea what I’m going to cook for a week to groceries scheduled in < 15 mins.

Anyway, that’s the plan.

And that’s me, building the shit I need to function in this world. Or try to. We’ll see how far I get.