First of all, thank you for making this program. It's very neat. The look and feel of it are excellent! I especially love the way you implemented the categories and the way you add categories in the recipe window. Very well done. The Scale Recipe tool is very easy to use, I like it a lot. All of the tools are very useful and well thought out. All the icon art is beautiful.
Now for the list of feature requests and other notes I jotted down while using ChickenPing:
1) I frequently use recipezaar.com, and I would love an easy way to import a recipe from there into ChickenPing. I see that you can import a RecipeML file, and I did some googling and found that recipezaar was a "Development Partner", but this seems to be quite a while ago. It's entirely possible that I'm just being dense and there's some easy, magical way to get a recipe from recipezaar into ChickenPing.
2) To enter recipes from a website, what I did was have the browser window open on one side of the screen, and have ChickenPing on the other. The problem with that was if I didn't move the main window out of the way, partially off-screen, then when I opened up the New Recipe window, the main window was in my way, blocking the website. I think it would be ideal to have the main window be able to be minimized independently of the New Recipe window. Another feature I would find useful, but not as important, is being able to make the New Recipe window "always on top", so that if I would have it on top of a webpage, but then want to scroll the webpage, it'd stay there on top of the webpage. I think if it was "always on top" all the time, that would be good, but the option to turn it on or off would be even better, because some people wouldn't like it to always be on top.
3) I would like the quantity text box to be much less restricted. I would want to be able to enter any of the following as a quantity: 1/4, pinch, 8, 1/2 to 1/4, and I would want to view it just as I typed it, right now, if I type in 1/4, it converts it to .25, but that's not how I want to see it in my recipe. This might be a US preference, which is where I'm at and what I'm used to. Also, I don't think there should be up & down buttons in the quantity section for the ingredient.
4) Also, after clicking on the Ingredients tab, these are the steps that you need to take to enter ingredients:
Click in blue area, in quantity field
Click inside text box, highlight "1"
Type number
Tab
Type measurement
Tab
Type name
Tab
Type comment
Enter
Repeat above steps to add next ingredient.
I would want it to be like this (after clicking on Ingredients tab):
Cursor is already in the Quantity field, waiting for my input
Type quantity (1/4 to 1/2)
Tab
Type measurement (cup)
Tab
Type name (butter)
Tab
Type comment (softened)
Enter
Repeat above steps to add next ingredient
5) When I click Add Ingredient, if I'm already editing an ingredient in the blue bar, I think it should save that ingredient, then put the cursor in the quantity field of the new ingredient. When not editing an ingredient, clicking Add Ingredient should put the cursor in the blue bar in the quantity field. Maybe more of a visual separation between the blue entry area and the list of ingredients would help to avoid confusion. It's not horribly confusing to a person used to a database, but some people (like maybe my mom) might be confused.
6) It would be ideal to be able to put the ingredients in the order the user has entered them. Sometimes in recipes, the directions say something like "Combine the first 5 ingredients", and if the user entering the recipe doesn't change that, their dish could be ruined when they make it!
7) For the ingredients, I would like it to automatically prepend a ", " to the beginning of the comment section of the ingredients when you're viewing the recipe. Typically, what you'd put in the comments section would be something like "chopped" or "diced", so how that commonly appears in a recipe is: "1 onion, chopped".
8 ) In the New Recipe window, on the Recipe Information tab, after typing the description, I would like to be able to hit tab and then type a number. Right now, it's selecting around the text box, not inside it, same with preheat. Also, "Preheat" is slightly confusing - instead of asking if the oven needs to be preheated, maybe you could change the tooltip to something like "Oven preheat temperature".
9) Shopping list icons: I think the icons for removing the selected item and clearing the shopping list should be swapped. If I have a paper list, and I want to remove an item from it, I might erase it. But if I wanted to clear the whole thing, I'd just throw it away and start again.
10) When you click Edit using the full editor in the Directions tab of the Recipe window, the tooltips for the undo and redo buttons both say "Cut".
11) I think it would make more sense if the default option in Search would be "Contains" instead of "Starts With".
12) I think "In The Fridge" should be "In the Fridge", like how it would be if it were a book title.
13) The In the Fridge section is somewhat confusing, maybe you could move the ingredient entry box down, and put above it something like "Ingredient:".
14) Shopping list icons: I think the icons for removing the selected item and clearing the shopping list should be swapped. If I have a paper list, and I want to remove an item from it, I might erase it. But if I wanted to clear the whole thing, I'd just throw it away and start again.
15) The ability to add your own icons for the recipe icon would be neat.
16) I don't use flickr, but I do use Picasa web albums, so I might find integration with Picasa fun and useful.
17) In the future, a way to find the nutrition facts for the recipe, like what recipezaar.com has, would be amazing.
Please take the above as extremely good-natured constructive criticism. I understand and respect that you must have put LOTS of time and effort into ChickenPing and we all dislike hearing that someone doesn't think our projects are completely perfect. Please let me know if anything I said didn't make sense or was confusing.
Preheat labels -> auto-preheat is doable
I was in the Options, in the Snapshots tab, and had checked my credentials for Picasa, and it said it worked, and then I hit the refresh button for the albums, and that worked, it gave me the list of them. Then, I went to a browser window and went to Picasa to make a new, blank album. Then I switched back to ChickenPing and hit the refresh button to see if my new album would show up. Then a window came up saying that the program had stopped working.