Foodspotting a Visual Guide to Good Food – you be the Critic!
by Jonathan Lonczak
Aug 31, 2011 7:35 AM –
Install
Foodspotting is a visual guide to good food and where to find it. Instead of reviewing restaurants, you can find and share where to find your favorite dishes using photos. If you’re trying to decide what to eat, you can… Features: See the nearest, latest and best foods around you. Find a particular food that you’re craving. Look up a restaurant and see what’s good there.
Price: Free
Tested on: Sony Xperia Play
Content Rating: Low Maturity
Pros & Cons:
Pros
- Allows you to find all of the best restaurants and dishes in your area!
- Allows you to see all of your friends food recommendations!
- Extremely attractive interface!
- Very easy to use!
- Backs up all of your information to a Foodspotting accounts!
- Allows you to become a local food critic!
Cons
- No native restaurant information, instead application forwards you to Yelp.
- Does not provide full menus for restaurants.
Features:
Foodspotting is one of the best Android application for finding and sharing the food you love. Foodspotting allows you to see recommended foods nearby, see the best foods in your area, and find local eateries that carry your favorite dish. It allows you to see where these dishes are being sold, view images of the food taken by other users, and read personal recommendations from other people using the application!
Broken in to four headings: Nearby, Latest, Best, and Wanted; this allows you to sort the Foodspotting directory in whatever order works best for you. In “Nearby” the application uses your device’s GPS to determine your current location and then shows you images of recommended dishes near where you are. The way the application does this is by displaying a picture of the dish on a backdrop that looks like the edge of a stamp with a name of the dish and the location at which it may be found. Further information is then provided when you click on the dish; such as the poster, the eatery, and the number of recommendations from other users for that dish.
In the “Latest” category you can see what foods have recently been added near your current location. This allows you to see what foods are currently trending and also allows you to evaluate which users are most active within the Foodspotting application.
The “Best” category gives a list of the most recommended foods in your area. The foods are displayed in the same fashion as Nearby and Latest, but you are able to scroll through only the best foods close to you by swiping your finger from side to side in order to move from image to image, and dish to dish.
Finally, the “Wanted” category is a place for you to keep a list of all of the interesting foods you have found in Foodspotting and try them out at a later date. After creating a Foodspotting account you can save this list for later perusal, and can even post your own food recommendations to share with other users.
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Foodspotting Italian Pastry
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Foodspotting French Onion Soup Details
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Foodspotting Cake Search
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Foodspotting Nearby
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Foodspotting Latest
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Usefulness:
Foodspotting is very useful if you are a food aficionado. It allows you to locate new restaurants and interesting food dishes to try in your area. It also allows you to share your favorite food dishes with others so that they can enjoy the same wonderful food as you.
Ease of Use:
Foodspotting is very easy to use. It will require you to register for an account if you wish to save your favorite dishes and start sharing foods with others. However, if you only wish to see other people’s recommendations and don’t care about creating your own the set up is easy, and the application is simple to use.
Frequently Used:
I am not sure how frequently I will use this application, because I have already scoped out most of the good eateries in my area. However, there were a few dishes recommended within Foodspotting that I have never tried before and that I would love to check out.
I also think that the idea of sharing some of my favorite dishes with others is excellent because it allows many of the small businesses in the area that produce scrumptious food to gain greater exposure for their amazing culinary creations. The bottom line is that if you enjoy many diverse dishes you will find a way to use this application, if plane Jane food is all you need then you probably won’t.
Interface:
The interface for Foodspotting is excellent. It maintains a strong visual appeal without becoming too cluttered and distracting the user. I love the way the application uses photographs of food dishes to drive its interface because it makes the user experience much more interesting and gives this application a level of refinement that both Yelp and Foursquare are lacking.
I do wish that there was native phone number, hours, and menu support for various restaurants within the application itself. Instead Foodspotting forwards you to Yelp in order to get this more detailed information about a specific eatery.