Shop’NCook Lite for iPhone: victim of its success…

Great start
Shop’NCook Lite was off to a great start:

472 users and over 300 new recipes in just three days!

Then crash!
Early this morning, I receive an e-mail to let me know that the app doesn’t even start. A few hours later, the rating on the app store is

one star…

As a user put it:
“The only reason I gave it a 1 star is due to you CAN’T give it a zero! The app won’t even open!”
What happened
I never expected there would be more than a hundred or so new recipes per month on the server.The first time the application is started after installing, it downloads the index of the new recipes on the server. Three hundred new recipes was too much and made the application crash…
What now…
This problem is now fixed. If you have installed the app within the last few hours and could not get it to start, you can try again and it will work now. You don’t have to reinstall the application, as I have only modified the code on the server so that it does not send more than 50 recipes in one time.

6 Comments

  1. jim haight says:

    just downloaded app.
    It works great. Looking forward to what the future will bring with this app. I am a big fan of shop n cook. I have used it for the past 12 months. I would like to be able to access my cookbooks on this app in the future.

  2. […] first Shop’NCook iPhone application has been released about two weeks ago. After a first glitch 3 days after release, everything has run smoothly. During these two weeks, the app has been […]

  3. Lprp8 says:

    Love Shop’N Cook on my Mac and it looks promising on my iPhone. I just loaded it and I’m a little disappointed. I really want to be able to access my recipes on my home computer. Is this on the way? Also, this app doesn’t seem entirely intuitive. I need a few more instructions. In fact one or two might be nice. It seems to be more or less “figure it out” software. I looked for help but didn’t find any. Maybe it is possible to access my recipes and load them on my iPhone, and I haven’t figured it out yet…???

  4. Mathilde says:

    Lprp8,

    To access your recipes on the iPhone, you need to upload them to the Direct Access database – you do that by clicking on the Share button of the toolbar of the Recipe manager panel of Shop’NCook.

    This app is still very limited, there is much more coming. For more information on my plans for the iPhone and iPad, see this post

  5. Mathilde says:

    Here is the “missing manual” of Shop’NCook Lite for iPhone:

    1. To upload recipes and bookmark recipes, input first your login information in the Settings tab. You can also create an account there by clicking on the “+” button. When you press the save button, the app will upload the recipe to the Direct Access database and bring the app up-to-date, in order to let you see the recipe you have uploaded. This can be time consuming the first time you do that as the index of several hundreds of recipes has to be downloaded from the server.

    2. To add a recipes: touch the “+” button on the Database or Categories tabs. Input the whole text of the recipe including ingredients in the field below “Recipe”.

    3. To delete a recipe: touch the top right button on the recipe view and select “Delete recipe”. You can only delete the recipes you have added!

    4. Recent tab: shows the latest recipes. To update the database, press on the top right button. As the index of only up to 20 recipes can be uploaded at a time, you may have to press many times on it at first to bring the database up-to-date.

    Note: the very first time you start the app, it attempts to download the latest recipes from the server. If this operation takes too much time, this operation will fail and the app won’t be able to start. This problem will be fixed shortly. Meanwhile, make sure you have a good internet connection the first time you start it, and try a few times if it fails.

  6. Christine Smith says:

    Can not figure out how to upload recipes of my own