Developers continue to cook up intuitive uses for Unity’s Lenses feature – the latest of which of a Cooking Lens.
The lens uses social food network ‘recipefy.com‘ as its search back-end, meaning access to a searchable catalog of 4000 recipes is placed within easy reach. Better still, all search results show displays the number of likes a given recipe has received from users, along with difficulty level and cooking time – perfect for letting you narrow down results with a simple glance.
The lens might seem simple on the surface but for its developer, Eduard Gotwig, things weren’t so straight forward. Recipefy.com, unlike sites such as ‘BigOven‘, lacks an API for interested parties to take advantage of. This meant Eduard had to write the scope and parser (the magic bits that read and relay search information back to the lens) by himself.
But his work thus far is sumptuous: you can search by keyword, ingredient, or dish type. For example, vegans and vegetarians will find plenty of meat and animal-derivative recipes on offer by combining terms, e.g, ‘egg free’, ‘vegan muffins’, ‘vegetarian curry’.
In the Oven
Although the lens is currently limited to showing 12 results (with no option for loading more than 12), and lacks filtering options such as cooking time, likes, difficulty, dish type, etc, Eduard is working on adding some of these features into future versions of the lens.
So consider this first version an appetizer for a more substantial course to come.
The lens is presently only available for Ubuntu 12.04 users to install, and can be found in the Unity Scopes Packagers PPA.
Thanks to Eduard