Adding a recipe book option to my Tasker-based todo list
My Tasker-created todo list is one of my most used Tasker creations, and I’ve occasionally used it as an example in posts and written about specific features. A few days ago I was adding the same set of items to my shopping list through it for the Nth time, and I thought there had to be a better way to deal with things I buy a lot. I came up with the idea of making a recipe book “add-on” to the shopping list part of the todo list, allowing me to browse a variety of preset recipes and then add them to the list in one go.
I ended up giving the add-on two options: adding the entire list of ingredients from a recipe, or go into detailed view and adding just individual items, useful for when you already have part of what you need. I have it set up so I can access this new recipe book via a long press action on the same icon where a single tap opens the shopping list, so I can quickly go there instead of the list itself.
There are many ways you can create something like this, and I ended up using a new method I hadn’t tried before. I now have a folder on my phone for recipes in text file format, where each text file is a new recipe. The ingredients are stored in the files, separated by commas. The scene dynamically lists the file names in a Menu scene element, so that adding or updating anything is a matter of editing the files in that folder. This makes it fully dynamic and capable of being updated without any tinkering with Tasker, which I think is a bonus.
I explain the specifics of how it works in the video above for anyone who’s interested. It uses some of what I was talking about last week regarding comma separated values, and is a perfect example of where you can use some of what I talked about in that post.
What I created is essentially a very basic version of something that can be made as complex as you want. The only purpose of mine is to store ingredients, but you could turn this into a proper recipe app with more feature. One guy even created a voice based cookbook a while ago, and something like that could be integrated in something like this as well. The method I use for turning a folder full of files into a menu in a scene also has uses outside of just what I used it for.