dinnR
Authors: Kyle Harris, Alexis Meskowski
Abstract: The dinnR app is a weekly meal planning app for dinner. Simply pick your meals from a community-driven database of recipes, and dinnR will generate a list of items needed for the week. Remove ingredients you have at home and the remaining ingredients can be used as a shopping list. Links are provided to each recipe along with credit to the user that submitted them. The options tab allows you to change the planning dates, set a measurement system, and filter by dietary restrictions. The "Submit a Recipe" tab lets the user submit recipes they enjoy to the app where we credit them.
Full Description:
Background
The inspiration for this app came from my girlfriend and I struggling to plan and shop for dinner. This app was started to help us plan for dinnR and make grocery shopping easier for us. We stream on twitch.tv and stream coding sessions on Saturday mornings. We have been working on it for a few months and have had a blast developing and sharing the app. With streaming, we have been able to get feedback from our community to improve the app. We also have had our friends submitting some of their favorite recipes to be in dinnR! Having our community contribute and use the app has been a fun and inspirational journey.
App Layout
Sidebar
The sidebar has dropdowns for the user to select what they plan to eat for dinner that night. If the user plans not to cook or use a recipe from outside the database they can select "Other Plans". As recipes are selected it will generate a table of ingredients that serves as a shopping list.
There are three buttons
- Plan For Me: For all blank inputs, fill them in with a random recipe
- Guided Tour: Takes the user on a tour of the inputs, tabs, and buttons
- Bookmark: Bookmarks the state of the app for the selected recipes and the options
Shopping List
This is the main tab of the app. Once the recipes are selected, a table will generate all of the ingredients needed to make dinner for the week. Once you have removed the ingredients you have at home the remaining ingredients will serve as a shopping list.
Recipes
We often have had a hard time bookmarking and remembering where our favorite recipes are. This tab shows links to each recipe in the database. It also shows who submitted the recipe, serving size, and the ingredients needed.
Submit a Recipe
Our community on twitch has started to use our app and has been submitting their favorite recipes. We have created a google form so users can easily share their recipes. Once submitted we update our data source and give them credit below their recipe.
Options
There are currently three options.
- Measurement: Imperial or metric? We live in the US and have friends in UK that prefer the metric system
- Dietary Preferences: Most of the recipes in the app are vegan. However, after our friends have shown interest in using the app and have submitted non-vegan meals we have decided to make the app have all recipes with a dietary preference filter
- Start Date: We begin our weeks on Monday so that is the default start of the week. If the user does not want to start on a Monday this can be changed here
About
This tab is a short bit about us and has links to our platforms.
App Info
This is a golem application. We have all of our data stored on google sheets. To avoid making too many requests to the API we currently have a script in the data-raw/ folder that updates the data source in the app. The app has a custom screen when a disconnection occurs.
Thanks
Thank you to all of the open-source projects that have made developing this application easy, fun, and enjoyable. This community is amazing! 
Category: Organization/Planning
Keywords: dinner, planning, cooking, food, twitch, community
Shiny app: https://koderkow.shinyapps.io/dinnR/
Repo: GitHub - KoderKow/dinnR: What's for Dinner?
RStudio Cloud: Posit Cloud
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