Evernote Food: The Right App For The Food Junkie
Among all the food-related mobile apps, Evernote Food (http://evernote.com/food) stand out from the rest of the market, boasting all-in-one features (similar to social media) for food junkies. Available for iOS and Android, it searches for new places to dine and preserves some of your home-made recipes, even some of the best eat-out moments. Aside from taking note of your daily meals, the Evernote Food also allows you to access a pool of interactive recipes, pin your favorites from the list into your own virtual cookbook, and note names of restaurants for future dining. Read our full review of the application below.
Highly recommended app
In our previous post, Evernote Food was listed as the best iOS kitchen app from the 10 applications we've featured. It was highly praised due to its ability to keep every aspect of your meal, including counting calories, presenting nutritional benefits, and organizing grocery shopping lists.
Meanwhile, O2 (http://o2.co.uk) also included the app on its comprehensive list of the top tech gadgets and tools for assisting chefs and kids in the kitchen. The article said the main strength of the app is its curating abilities, allowing you to save all family recipes in one platform that is accessible to multiple devices. We'll discuss more of these features below.
Four basic features
As you launch the app, it displays four of its main features: Explore Recipes, My Cookbook, Restaurants, and My Meals.
- Explore Recipes
It pulls recipes from a selection of food blogs pre-configured with Evernote. The manner at which the images are presented lives up to its huge thumbnail aesthetic. You can also pin (similar to Pinterest) your preferred recipe blogs on a virtual cookbook, if you want to create your own version of the dish. The app directly goes to the main website of the source in full details.
- My Cookbook
After pinning certain recipes, the My Cookbook tab narrows them down into two sources: the Explore Recipes and the Evernote account. If you have a cluttered account, Evernote Food identifies and categorizes your recipes automatically into groups such as Main Course, Appetizer, Side Dishes, Baking, Breakfast, etc. However, you may encounter minor glitches, wherein the app mistakenly identifies a regular note as a recipe. In this case, you can hit the "Not A Recipe" button to remove it from the list.
- Restaurants
The Restaurants tab narrows down a list of actual dining places. Using your device's GPS, it browses the web for the nearest bars, cafes, and hangout places, based on the keywords you typed. In PCMag's review (http://www.pcmag.com), the best feature of this tab is its ability to relate any restaurant information to your Evernote account, allowing you to access its map and menu.
- My Meals
The My Meals tab employs an Instagram-like mechanism, where you can post notes and photos of the food you ate, the location, or the people you're with. You can incorporate additional information, such as the date, place, and time of the dining experience.
Logging meals
Surprisingly, logging meals is a different feature from the My Meals section. MakeUseOf (http://www.makeuseof.com) said this feature is the heart of the app, serving as a diet log to record all your meals. To use this feature, there are certain field you need to fill in, including an automatic location tagging feature to share the name of the dining place with your friends. Additionally, you can view the images fully by pulling down a gripper below it.
Clipping restaurants
Clipping restaurants are also possible in the app, a feature powered by Foursquare. Aside from searching for new restaurants, you can use Foursquare to search the location of your upcoming trip. It displays a restaurant's map, address, contact information, and photos of the place. However, Foursquare will only be able to tap into the information that users provide. Thus, it works best in the cities where you've used the geolocation tool beforehand.
This sums up why Evernote Food is the best mobile tool for the food junkie. Combining a Geo-tagging feature and an Instagram-like photo-hosting service, it certainly lives up to conjure the best dining experience.