RecipeLens

RecipeLens is an app made to help users with cooking meals. The app takes ingredients that the user inputs and returns recipes using their ingredients while accommodating dietary restrictions.

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Inspiration

We got the idea from the fact that we often don't have much ideas about what to eat because of our limited experience cooking, so we decided to build an app that would help in inspiring ideas for what to cook with the ingredients at any given situations

What it does

RecipeLens allows anyone, from the college student with a hotdog and a bun in their fridge, to a mom figuring out what to cook for her children, to a professional cook trying to sharpen his skills, to have access to the highest quality recipes in an easy manner with what they have to cook with. RecipeLens also caters (sorry for the pun) to dietary restrictions of the users to allow for an inclusive platform that aids any and everyone who wants to cook a nutritional and delicious meal

How we built it

We built our application on Flutter for efficiency, and integrated many packages including the text-to-speech functionality, HTTPS Request, and SVG implementation. Additionally, we integrated two main APIs in the back-end which is edamam for ingredient search and spoonacular for recipe filteration. On the front-end we included many different files for multiple windows and upheld support for both Android and iOS.

Challenges we ran into

Initially we had only planned to use one API, but soon after we began smoothing out the app we found out that the API we had used didn't allow for ingredient searching based on ingredients we choose, but instead only permits excluding ingredients from recipe searching, so we had to find another recipe API that we could combine with the original API, which took very long hours of post-midnight work to complete, but we were able to resolve this

Accomplishments that we're proud of

None of us had ever used Dart or Flutter, and only one of us had ever done mobile development, so to have made this app which we are all proud of and to have done so with incredible UX is something that we take great pride in

What we learned

We Learned how to coordinate together, plan, and organize our git commits/pulls/pushes. We initially decided to use liveShare but ran into multiple issues with the process. We ended up deciding to use a hybrid configuration by adding code to LiveShare and testing it on a local file before pushing. We also learned how to use Dart, Flutter setup which was quite new for us who are active React advocates.

What's next for RecipeLens

This app holds potential as a student utility app, and since we are all going to post-secondary education in Fall 2024, then this app would benefit us directly, as well as most of our peers, so we find great importance in maintaining and even massively improving the app

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