Tibls was born to solve a unique problem that I had... I split my time between my homes in Seattle and Santa Barbara. Since I cook several times per week, my recipes were a mess of printed sheets of paper and bookmarks to favorite recipe pages.
I decided to solve this problem once and for all. To create a simple to use iPad app that would allow me to organize all of my recipes in one place. As part of this effort I wanted to also integrate ingredient selection during meal-prep, and various types of timers for each step in the recipe.
One of the issues I wanted to solve for was a step that reads something like: "Cook the chicken for 3 minutes and then flip and cook for 2 more minutes." Tibls supports this mode of timer natively. Just edit a recipe step and add a timer or edit an existing timer. Set the main timer value and flip timer value and your cooking step will contain this sort of "flip timer."
Importing recipes is relatively straight forward. Tibls will import from most modern web sites, especially those that have focused on solid integration with search engine based discovery. You can even import directly from the New York Times cooking app (assuming that you have a subscription).
Sharing recipies or exporting a all or some of your recipies is simple. You can text a recipie to another tibls user by using share from a recipes menu, or a collection of recipes from the home or queue page's menu. I initially did bulk export to save myself if I made a horrible bug. But now that I'm beyond that I export all recipes from time to time just for peace of mind, and to hammer home the idea that it would be nice if all of our daily use apps supported a full export/import flow. Note: tibls also supports PDF export, because sometimes you just want to print a recipe or share a recipe to someone who cooks old-school, with paper printed recipes...
I was initially opposed to doing an iPhone layout simply because I did not think there would be enough screen real estate to effectively cook with a phone. I was wrong... My family convinced me to support the iPhone as a replacement or companion to the iPad version.
My family was right. And I convinced myself of this while at the grocery store one day when I needed to make something for dinner, but I had forgotten to write down the ingredients that I needed in order to make that dish. I had tibls in my pocket so I just looked up the recipe and bought what I needed.
Once I had the iPhone version running, I decided that using my iPhone to manage the shopping process was a no brainer. I built the shopping list feature and spent many weeks perfecting its usability during both the planning and shopping process. This in-store live testing let me down the path of decluttering the list of checked items, hiding staples, trying to auto-organize the list around various cluster: meat, produce, grains, and dairy, etc.
I hope you enjoy using tibls as much as I've enjoyed building it...