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,…

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.

The basic structure of Lemur has two main areas.

This is the Plan:

And this is the List of Dishes:

Choosing a meal time displays a list where you can populate a meal with a dish that already exists or create a new one:

Lemur’s core mission is to make the flow of looking at your week (or a few days into the future) and populating the list with meals as quick and painless as possible. To make this efficient, I want to focus…

Some of my favourite programming writing is Brent Simmons’ Vesper Sync Diary. Brent does an amazing job of describing the challenges encountered while implementing sync: one of the hardest things in programming to do well. Sync is often talked about in the abstract, but Brent discusses the specific tradeoffs of various solutions in concrete examples for the late notes app Vesper. The sync diary made a huge difference to the way I think about programming and writing about programming. I’m going to experiment with doing something similar.

For the last four years, I’ve been working on a little…