Apple By Graham Templeton Jun. 3, 2014 12:15 pm
Humans have been baking bread for something like 10,000 years, or roughly 5% of our lifetime as a species. It’s one of our oldest enduring traditions, and like all ancient things it can sometimes resist changing with the times.
Physical cookbooks have given way to recipe websites, but the functionality really hasn’t progressed all that much; we have a static list of ingredients with some corresponding volumes. Beneath, a numbered or bulleted list lays out the procedures, usually referencing ingredients without amounts. This forces the reader to continually glance back and forth between the ingredients and instructions. These days, with such a focus on design and streamlined interaction, it’s hard to imagine why this hasn’t been addressed.
Enter Drop, an iPad-connected kitchen scale that interfaces with a companion cooking app. The scale looks nifty, certainly one of the more aesthetically pleasing scales you could keep on your counter, but it’s the app that really sells the package.
Currently for iPad users only, Drop will take you through the recipe process step-by-step, helping you to convert whole lists of ingredients for different sized projects. If you only happen to have 85% of the required amount of flour, Drop will adjust the recipe accordingly. The app can be used hands-free, which is basically a requirement for many kinds of baking.
This isn’t quite what we’d be hoping for from a step forward for cooking, purely because of its walled garden approach; Drop only works with a curated list of interactive recipes. It would be revolutionary if the app could read and analyze any recipe you fed to it, automatically correlate instructions with ingredients, and prepare an interactive recipe from a static one.
One of the biggest problems with this is that Drop, being a scale, measures weight, while most recipes list their ingredients in volume. Conversions between the two aren’t always precise between countries, brands, and even geographical elevations. In the case of Drop, your use of the more advanced recipe features will be limited by the company ‘s efforts, tastes, and budgeting for recipes.
Drop has other cool features, like suggesting substitutes if you’re out of just one ingredient. It will automatically manage your various timers with alarms and reminders as necessary. It’s also got some social media integration so you can easily share pictures of your creations — and really, why would you bother doing anything if you couldn’t use it to fish for Facebook likes?
Drop is available to pre-order right now for $80. At launch the price will rise to $99.
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Physical cookbooks have given way to recipe websites, but the functionality really hasn’t progressed all that much; we have a static list of ingredients with some corresponding volumes. Beneath, a numbered or bulleted list lays out the procedures, usually referencing ingredients without amounts. This forces the reader to continually glance back and forth between the ingredients and instructions. These days, with such a focus on design and streamlined interaction, it’s hard to imagine why this hasn’t been addressed.
Enter Drop, an iPad-connected kitchen scale that interfaces with a companion cooking app. The scale looks nifty, certainly one of the more aesthetically pleasing scales you could keep on your counter, but it’s the app that really sells the package.
Currently for iPad users only, Drop will take you through the recipe process step-by-step, helping you to convert whole lists of ingredients for different sized projects. If you only happen to have 85% of the required amount of flour, Drop will adjust the recipe accordingly. The app can be used hands-free, which is basically a requirement for many kinds of baking.
This isn’t quite what we’d be hoping for from a step forward for cooking, purely because of its walled garden approach; Drop only works with a curated list of interactive recipes. It would be revolutionary if the app could read and analyze any recipe you fed to it, automatically correlate instructions with ingredients, and prepare an interactive recipe from a static one.One of the biggest problems with this is that Drop, being a scale, measures weight, while most recipes list their ingredients in volume. Conversions between the two aren’t always precise between countries, brands, and even geographical elevations. In the case of Drop, your use of the more advanced recipe features will be limited by the company ‘s efforts, tastes, and budgeting for recipes.
Drop has other cool features, like suggesting substitutes if you’re out of just one ingredient. It will automatically manage your various timers with alarms and reminders as necessary. It’s also got some social media integration so you can easily share pictures of your creations — and really, why would you bother doing anything if you couldn’t use it to fish for Facebook likes?
Drop is available to pre-order right now for $80. At launch the price will rise to $99.
More...
