Lemur is a simple meal planning app in active development. I’m documenting some of the design, product, and development decisions as part of the Lemur Development Diary.

I’ve made some changes based on the discussion in the last post.

I’m liking the distinction between main and sides. But, this introduces some new challenges:

• I was having no problem categorizing things until I ran right into “Caesar Salad”. The salad can be a main or a side. And, of course, there are lots of dishes that operate that way. This isn’t boolean.
• Restaurant is sort of weird here. Mains and sides have Difficulty, but restaurants don’t. It’s kind of like a difficulty of zero. Also, a restaurant isn’t a main or a side, it’s a place. The filtering might be fine to work as above (you pick a main, side, or an eatery) but the categorization is more complex.

I’m thinking of something like his when you make a dish:

I’ll need to mess around with the design here to make it not terrible, but I think the idea is sound. By default, most stuff is going to be a prepared meal with a main, so the defaults there are fine. For the most part, you probably just need to choose a difficulty and that’s it.

When it’s a restaurant, you hit that and you can opt out of all other options. When it’s prepared, something can be a main, a side, or both and it has difficulty.