Eating It App

Untappd

A social network for beer drinkers, Untappd allows enthusiasts to share their reviews of their favourite tipples, mark out what’s available where, and keep track of which bottles behind the bar they’ve yet to take on. Good idea, very current, all lovely. One problem – you have to have an Untappd account for the app to be any use.

That is to say it won’t load anything at all until you hand over your email address. Pubs may have a whole host of problems, from insufficient seating to the occasional presence of dogs that everyone has to just tolerate for some reason, but no member of bar staff has ever interrupted a punter mid-order to shout ‘PLEASE ENTER USERNAME AND PASSWORD.’ Not to say we wouldn’t welcome that as a hilarious development - bar persons of Scotland, our email address is at the front of the mag, YouTube clips will suffice.

Platter

‘Food porn’ – that’s a thing that dour people refer to. Taking pictures of food in a way that makes it look appetising – what’s next, using a fork for your noodles because it’s winter in Scotland and handling chopsticks with cold hands is like playing football with canoes strapped to your feet?

Platter is the acceptable face of food porn, combining lots of colour-corrected photos of other people’s dinners with information on how to make said dinners. Users can tag their photos with the ingredients used, allowing others to misinterpret quantities and ratios to create a completely different dish. A photo of this dish can then be posted on Platter, thus ensuring its place as the first ever perpetual motion machine-slash-food photography app.

British St. Food

Now this should be right up our street. A sleek and swanky interface, an intelligent map interface that doesn’t automatically assume you’re living in the developer’s house, and a chance to get some on-trend street food? British St. Food, you are spoiling us.

Well, you would be, if this were the Northwest edition of this fair magazine. As it is, British St. Food in Scotland is a bit like a high-powered yet austere car with no wheels or passenger side door. On our test, we walked past several prominent street food spots in central Edinburgh, waving our phones in their direction in the vague hope that our screens would tell us what we could literally see in front of our eyes.

Wait, what’s this? All the info in this app is provided directly by the street food vendors? Right, this is fixable. Street food types of Edinburgh and Glasgow – get your phones out, then we’ll all be able to find you without having to find you. This would be good.

Evernote Food

So you want to cook something, but you can’t decide what. It’s a common problem, and one that we can well understand and would quite like a fix for. Now, do you live in a particularly large branch of Tesco? If so, Evernote Food is the app for you.

Pulling together recipes from across the web in a nice format complete with arty cropping of the food photography, Evernote Food can give out hundreds of ideas for the evening’s eating, letting you save the recipes you like most to the app so you’ll never lose them.

Unfortunately, there’s no way of seeing what’s in any of the recipes before you click through, so you’ll spend a while flicking back and forward between recipes trying to find something achievable. By ‘a while’ we mean all evening, and by ‘flicking back and forward’ we mean picking shards of iPhone screen out of the wall because who has two kinds of marsala to hand when they’re short of ideas and just want to use some chicken up AAAGH.

Foodspotting

Basically, what we’re looking for is an app that shows us nice pictures of food then tells us where that food is. A Foodspotting app, as it were. What, really? The name and everything?

Yes, Foodspotting is a brilliant food app. Load it up and bam! Loads of user-submitted photos of the best food near you. The map view plays like a cross between food porn and an aerial bombing raid. Pick a bit of your city, press a button and boom! Thumbnails of tasty-looking food appear all over the place, with directions and links and everything.

You can set up your own little spotters’ network if you don’t have enough social interaction points to manage as it is, or you can do absolutely everything without signing up at all. It’s intuitive, it’s well-presented, and it can show you what your dinner will look like before you even leave the house. It may also be food journalism’s SkyNet moment, so please don’t download it.