Review: Harvest for the iPhone

Another in our series of app reviews to help you in the kitchen, this time I took a look at an app suggested by Chuti—Harvest for the iPhone.

Harvest is a very straight-forward app with one purpose—to help you select the best fruits and vegetables when you’re at the market.

The interface is very intuitive. Launch the app and you’re given an alphabetical list of all the produce in the app to choose from:

Select the item you’re looking for, or use the search filter located at the top right hand corner to search for an item and then select it. Once you’ve done that, you’ll be taken to the item’s page, which consists of lots of good information starting with a picture of the produce, how to choose the best of the bunch, some information about the item and even (if you click on the “Storing” button in the upper right hand corner) how to keep the produce fresh once you get it home.

One other useful piece of information available in Harvest is the item’s “Pesticide Level.” It appears at the bottom of the item’s page and you can even choose it as an option on the main screen of the app to sort the produce by “Pesticide Level.” The last option on the main screen is the “About Harvest,” which gives you a link to their website (which is not very useful as it’s just an advertisement for the app) and a button to suggest more produce items.

All in all, I found Harvest to be a valuable and very easy-to-use app, especially for a food noob like myself. It was super convenient to have in my pocket on my phone when I was wandering around the market. My only gripe about it is the price. The website lists it for $2.99, the App Store has it (at the time of this writing) for $1.99 and it’s been on sale at least once for $0.99 It’s totally worth it at 99 cents, not a bad deal at $1.99, and not worth the price at $2.99. I think it’d be nice if they stuck with the $ 0.99 price, but I’m not altogether unhappy with it at the $1.99 price. I’m going to give it 4 pans.

(all prices are in US Dollars)

Harvest for the iPhone
by Sean Murphy
Available in the App Store [Link]

MenuPages—iPhone App

This is another one of a useful app for foodie. Ever wonder what some of the restaurant you’re interested in going have on their menu and how much? Well, wonder no more… there’s an App for that!! It even has the full menu and reviews on it.  They are only in BOS, NYC, LA, PHI, SF, FL, DC and CHI so… sorry JJ a,d MikeR

It’s FREE. Isn’t that the best kind of App? Check this App Out.

Yum Cha Dim Sum Pocket Guide

So I went crazy about the iPhone App for sushi and found another App. This time it is for Dim Sum. This may be even more useful than Sushipedia since they actually built in pronunciation of each dish so you can play the sound for the cart pushers.

Wherever you go, the Yum Cha Pocket Guide in your iPhone or iPod Touch provides handy information for over 100 popular Dim Sum items available in most Chinese Restaurants in the world.

Each Dim Sum in the guide comes with:
- a clear picture showing what the item looks like
- description in English telling you what it is
- its name in Chinese writing so that the local Chinese know what you are talking about
- its standard Mandarin PinYin (pronunciation) if you want to learn how to say it properly
- information about key ingredients (especially useful for people with food allergy)
- estimated energy content (Kcal/100g serving) for the health conscious minds
- Cantonese pronunciations of the food names in real native voice for those interested to learn

I can see a lot of my friends getting this app. Unfortunately it is $2.99. Not too bad but $.99 would have been better for me. Try this one out, I think it would be very helpful. Here is the link to the App.

Sushipedia—iPhone App

I was looking around for some food apps the other day and found “Sushipedia” which ranks as one of the coolest sushi apps. First and for most, it is FREE. I think they are working on the PRO version for release soon.

What is Sushipedia?
Sushipedia is the most comprehensive sushi reference application currently available on the iPhone and iPod Touch. It is the result of nearly three years research that has been assembled by our experts to arm users with total accuracy bridging many misconceptions found in the complex world of Sushi Culture. Packed with data, features and photos, Sushipedia is the clear choice!

Some of the features are very useful—color picture, seasonal sushi, favorite sushi, and the sushi encyclopedia to name a few. They also put in some tips and history about sushi so that you can learn about the culture also.

If you have an iPhone or iPod Touch and love sushi, this is a must have App for sushi lovers. Download it FREE on iTunes.

Food Scanner—iPhone App

Keeping a food journal on the iPhone is nothing new; nor is it easy enough, on account of all the typing required, for most people to keep up with. But what if you could just scan your food?

That’s the concept behind FoodScanner, which adds barcode scanning to the iPhone food-minding app concept, by way of Occipital’s scanning engine. And it works! Either maintained on its own or synced with the associated DailyBurn website, FoodScanner is as simple as can be: Just scan a food item’s barcode with your iPhone’s camera, press a button to indicate how many servings you’ve had, and you’ll (almost) immediately see an official-style nutritional panel, the contents of which are stored in your personal food database so you can feel fat numerically, if not physically.

The app relies on a preexisting database of about 200,000 foods and associated nutritional values, and the developers hope to see a bunch more once people start using the app—linking an unrecognized barcode to a food item only takes users a few seconds. The only thing missing here, really, is the ability to scan non-coded items, like fruit and veg—something which we know is at least plausible, since Amazon’s been doing it with their shopping apps for a while now. FoodScanner still requires you to type these items in manually.

The FoodScanner app debuts for three dollars, and the online DailyBurn service is free. And hey, even if you’re not dieting, there’s a certain appeal to seeing your terrible, terrible diet quantified. [FoodScanner]