Hi there!
I’m going to take a break from recipe posts to show you a little side project I’ve been working on (don’t worry, recipes will be back as normal in 2 days!). I decided a couple of years ago that I should like to learn some programming skills and with the help of a friend of mine I managed to pick up the basics. Since then I’ve been applying my new-found knowledge to various little applications, with the idea of learning more, improving my skills, as well as maybe actually creating something that I, or even others, might find useful.
Over the past nine months I have slowly added to my food blog here, while at the same time become more active in the blogging community. I love to read other food blogs and let the blogger know how great their stuff looks but you know what I’ve noticed? Perhaps I’m just looking in the wrong place, but a good percentage of blogs – at least the ones which I follow are written by US people. Nothing wrong with that, you say – absolutely not, except for the fact that most of you guys use “cups” as a measurement, while I’m using grams, and, what’s worse is that cups is a measurement of volume, while grams is, of course, a measurement of weight. All the recipes I see every day… while not impossible by any means, making them isn’t the easiest thing to do.
There exist quite a few online services which convert between different units – incidentally, I strongly recommend WolframAlpha. It’s the site I use to calculate the calorific values of my dishes (seriously, try it out – just tap in “70g Cheddar Cheese”, or “2 cups raisins” and uncover a whole load of awesome information. Even this has its down sides though. It’s online only to name one. I got to thinking – what if I could bring together this information, stash it in a tool? I’d be able to instantly convert values required to enable me to find out finally what “1 cup of mashed banana” was in grams, for example.
So I present “Sporkable”. It’s my tool – a labour of love. No-one’s saying it’s going to be winning any prizes for complex programming Black Magic, but it does the job, and in a relatively clean, tidy way I like to think. There are several ways the tool can be improved, but those are all “behind the scenes” type stuff. Sporkable currently has automatic update functionality, so whenever I push a new build with an updated ingredient list, for example, you will be prompted if you want to update after starting the tool.
The tool was developed in C#.NET and will currently run in Windows only. You will need the following pre-requisites in order to run the tool:
– .NET framework 3.5
– Windows Installer 3.1
As long as your PC isn’t from the stone age and you’ve been keeping it updated you should have these, no problem, although this will be checked automatically when installing. The tool is deployed using Microsoft’s ClickOnceΒ technology, which means that installation and updating is performed very easily (now you see why I needed a Windows host!).
So, I’d love it if you wanted to give it a try. I’ll be improving it over time – more ingredients, more conversion options and so forth, so hopefully you might even find it useful, though if you have any feedback, encounter any problems or have some suggestions or ideas I’d love to hear them. Leave a reply here or on the linked page. As for the tool…
Greg says
This is great! Katherine was set to make a cake the other nght, realized it was in metric (OK and we didn't have almonds too) and switched recipes.
Charles says
Hehe, I hope you have a use for it every now and again. It's not perfect, by any manner of means and it's definitely a work in progress. I'm working on making it into an ASP.NET application next, so it can be used on a website… perhaps included into a side-bar on a blog or something π
Sissi says
Congratulations Charles! It looks like a perfect, simple to use tool, though sadly not for my Mac π
I must thank you for the converter website link, I will change it at once. The one I have is much much worse.
Charles says
Thanks Sissi – I'm going to make an online version soon, so you could display it directly on your website, for example, if you wanted!
Sissi says
Charles, it sounds like very good news! Great idea!
Caroline says
What a great idea, Charles! I'm sure this would be very helpful. Hey, I can barely even keep track of US measurements–and I'm a baker! That's just wrong.
Charles says
Thanks Caroline – I think it's a good way of developing my skills and doing something quite useful at the same time. I think in time it has the potential of being really cool π
kristy says
I am totally fascinated by this. I have alwasy been interested/amazed by programming. I'm going to play around with this tomorrow evening when I have some more time. What a great idea Charles! So clever!
Charles says
Thanks Kristy – if you were interested, I could send you the source code, so you could see what it looks like "under the hood". I'm going to keep working on this in my free time as I think it has a lot of potential so I hope you're able to find it useful occasionally π
kristy says
LOL. The source code would look foreign to me. I recently uploaded the content to a few websites that my firm designed for various clients. Let's say, that was an experience. I think it would be helpful for me to learn some basic code as well. It would have made that process a lot easier!
I've tried to download Sporkable, but it when I do it says it can't open the specified file because I don't have the proper permissions. Would this be a firewall/antivirus thing?
Charles says
For the permissions – are you at home or at work? If you're at work then the network admin has probably set a group policy which prevents installation of third-party software. If you're at home (or even if you're at work and third party software is allowed) then you may need to run the software as an administrator, depending on the type of user account you have. If you're at home and you're running Windows Vista or Windows 7 it's usually sufficient to locate the downloaded "setup.exe" file, right-click and select "Run as Administrator". You'll need to enter the password to the computer's administrator account (or just click "OK", depending on the computer's UAC (User Account Control) settings!
For the source code – when I first became interested in learning C# I bought this book. It teaches you a heck of a lot, in just 24 easy lessons and from that, the help of my friend and resources online I was able to expand my knowledge! It's fun to get into stuff like this – even if it's just for your own amusement π
Kristy says
Got it to download! Yay! Very cool little tool. π
jenny at baking Devi says
Hi Charles, this is so cool. I'm looking forward to the online version too. Thanks for the link to WolframAlpha I'd never heard of it before. Best wishes with this project we wish you every success with it, Jenny and Shilpa at Baking Devils.
jenny at baking Devi says
P.S. I've just downloaded Sporkable and converted my first ingredient and it worked perfectly, I think this is going to be a really useful tool for me. Thanks Charles!
Charles says
Thanks Jenny! I hope you find it useful from time to time. WolframAlpha is amazing isn't it? It's like a much more specific version of Google – really nice to have such information at ones' fingertips π