iOS Apps

I’m working on some iOS application for some time now. The iOS Apps I developed which are available for download in the Apple App Store can be found here. Please select one to get more details and an iTunes link to the app.

Let’s Cook! - The ideal cooking companion for your iPad and iPhone

Let’s Cook! is a kitchen utility intended for households and hobby chefs. Let’s Cook! focuses on the cooking experience itself. We hope people will like to spend more time in the kitchen and invite friends and family like ourselves. We came up with an ideal representation for a recipe: a timeline. Most recipes in magazines only have a few steps which makes it look nice on paper but not ideal when it comes to putting the dish into reality. The timeline feature supports as many steps as you want. Also we made the experience that recipes are more easy to follow if you have at least one picture which describes what to do in each step and a time associated with it. We introduced three step categories which have a different color scheme so you can manage your time more efficiently:

  • Preparation (orange): which is actual an execution step not involving a heat source
  • Waiting or resting (dark gray): you do not have to do anything
  • Cooking (red): a step which involves a heat source
  • Hint (visialized as light gray box) : hints out a step if you come up with an idea,alternative while cooking it, watching a cooking show or reading a cooking book

Summing it up: cooking with the timeline becomes more like assembling a piece of furniture of a famous Swedish furniture company. The good news is that the same accounts for the recipe editor: The ultimate goal is to fill your cabinet up with your favourite recipes.

The features of Version 1.2

  • Recipe cabinet with filter possibilities and search
  • Rich recipe Editor with support for English and German
  • Universal iPhone and iPad app
  • Recipe import and export from iCloud or Google Drive
  • Recipe sharing with Airdrop and Email
  • Shopping list export by attaching it to an Email
  • Scale Ingredients up or down according to party size
  • Find your own recipe alongside other recipes using spotlight search
  • Timeline representation
  • NO LOGIN REQUIRED

If a feature is missing or you experience problems please, contact us. We will continue developing this app continuously.

DropBeacon – Virtual iBeacon iOS App

DropBeacon is a just works solution to use your iPhone or iPad as an iBeacon. You can adjust all iBeacon specific parameters such as the proximity UUID, major and minor ID of the beacon.

In order to use this app, at least an iPhone4S is necessary. Newer ones support BLE as well. The App will not work on an iPhone4, iPhone3GS, iPhone3G or iPod touches. I have not implemented the app as universal app so there is no iPad UI available.

Since the app is not using regular iOS UI components, see the attached Vimeo video tutorial illustrating the usage of the app. I think it is very easy to use.

The app can be downloaded for $0.99 in the Apple App Store 

BLExplr – Bluetooth Low Energy Explorer

BLExplr is an app to find, connect and browse Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) devices nearby. The simple app can be used to connect to a given BLE peripheral, browse through the services which are provided. Moreover the characteristics of a given service can be browsed. The current version of the App supports read, write, notify and indicate characteristics. One peripheral can be connected at the same time. If the app is running in the background, indicate and notify characteristics will wake up the app to show the changed value to the user.

In order to use this app, at lease an iPhone4S is necessary. Newer ones support BLE as well. The App will not work on an iPhone4, iPhone3GS, iPhone3G or iPod touches. I have not implemented the app as universal app so there is no iPad UI available.

Since there are not so many BLE peripherals available on the market, this app is a good tool for developers to see if their developed peripherals behave as intended.

I have implemented this app, and it’s predecessor “iBLE” during the development of the BLE Shield to see how they will interact. Since many people already asked me about iBLE I decided to reimplement iBLE as BLExplr and do lot of code cleanups.

A very nice feature of BLExplr is, that service and characteristics dictionaries are stored on the server. Using this feature a service or characteristic which is unknown to the iOS’s CoreBluetooth implementation, can be added easily by adding them to the server side dictionary. This dictionary can be downloaded manually in the settings of the app. In version 1.0 this must be done manually. You don’t need to download the dict, but some services and characteristics become more readable.