In recent months I've started to cultivate a new hobby: cooking and baking. In the days of computers and smartphones, the recipes are accessible on websites and social media, so it turned out that I kept desired recipes in bookmarks in Chrome, in saved posts on Facebook or Instagram, which created a number of problems for me:
- I didn't always remember where each recipe was kept
- The smartphone screen turns off a minute later and while cooking the hands are dirty
- Sometimes the post owners delete it
Although there are quite a few apps that allow you to create a digital recipe book, but most of them are in English, have an outdated user interface and the information is stored in the device's memory. So very quickly I found myself sitting down to design an app that would meet exactly all my needs - CookEat!
I've developed CookEat using React Native and a number of code libraries from npm. In order to ensure that I could access recipes from any device I used the Firebase authentication system; I also used Firestore as the database of the app. For managing the states in the app, I've been using Redux. In addition, I used Cloudinary to store the images in the cloud and also built a small server in order to manage image delete in case of need. Because a UI was important to me, I drew inspiration from modern apps like Instagram and Gmail and sketches from Dribbble. I also used animations to enhance user experiences.
