App of the Week: Irish Food Street

Irish Food Street
Developer: Feel Social
Cost: $0.99
Runs on: iPhone
Website: www.feelsocial.com

When was the last time you cooked some Irish food? I’m guessing last St. Patrick’s Day. Am I right or am I right? In honor of the green-colored food holiday, I’ll take a look at Irish Food Street, an app that presents a few dozen Irish recipes.

Opening the app reveals a bold page of six category options: Soups, Salads, Appetizers, Main Courses, Side Line, and Deserts (sic). Clicking on any of these categories presents a text list of recipes. One more level deep and you get a small recipe image, a short description and the cooking instructions. This page also presents sub-navigation options for Ingredients and Tips & Notes. Both are exactly what you’d expect.

Each recipe page allows users to snap a picture of their food once you’ve done your cooking and danced your jig of approval. For those repeat recipes, you can store multiple pictures in a gallery of just that recipe. Unfortunately, you can’t do anything else with that picture. You can’t make it the default thumbnail, e-mail it, or view it outside of the app at all.

Not being able to share is a common theme with this app. You can’t e-mail the ingredient lists or the recipes, the app is not connected with any social networks, you can’t print, or do anything else outside of this app. It’s like you’re the leprechaun and this app is your pot of gold that only you can enjoy.

Like many other apps I’ve reviewed recently, this app could use a copy editor. Aside from the weird hyphenations of the recipe names and inconsistent capitalization of words, I found a rogue number 11 that appeared on the recipe step list for corned beef, even though there are only 10 steps.

In general, the app is very easy to use, simple to navigate and is fairly pleasing esthetically. There’s not much polish or added functionality outside of simply being a recipe guide. The photo option has potential, but it feels like the developers abandoned the idea halfway through development and forgot to take it out. Also, even though there’s not a tremendous amount of recipes in this app, it would be nice to have a search function, either for specific ingredients or recipe names.

Irish Food Street isn’t a worthless app, but it’s also not a rare four-leaf discovery amongst a field of shamrocks.

Toque Rating: 2.5/5