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Food

© Janice Karin

Several months ago I wrote a short blurb on Food by Alan Harder in the Specialized Database article in my Spotlight on Freeware series. In the meantime, I removed Food from my Palm in one of my Great Application Purges (TM). Three weeks ago I helped organize a dinner for visitors from Sweden who, like most of my friends, are coke drinkers and avoid Pepsi like the plague. I tried to call the restaurant we wanted to go to to make sure they had coke, but didn't worry too much when I couldn't get through. They had to serve coke, right? After all, I'd been there and liked it, as had my father and some of my friends.

As we sat at dinner drinking our iced tea, ginger ale, and root beer, I made a note to reinstall Food and place it on my inviolate "never delete" list.

Food provides an easy way to track which restaurants serve coke, provide drink refills, have all-you-can-eat buffets, require reservations, or whatever you care the most about the restaurants you eat at. It also categorizes restaurants by location and cuisine type, allowing each restaurant to have multiple cuisine types.

You can use Food immediately with no configuration if you want. It will provide a default set of cuisine types and some very basic locations (out of town, international, etc.). It will provide easy tracking of whether a restaurant does takeout, requires reservations, gives free refills on drinks, and whether it is one of your favorites. However, five minutes of configuration will make Food much more powerful.

Just select the Options|Preferences menu item. You will see three tabs: Food Types, Locations, and Extras. The Food Types tab allows you to set up to sixteen cuisine types. You can delete or modify default entries and add your own. If you don't like sushi (I don't) remove it and replace it with something else. The Locations tab allows you to set up to sixteen restaurant locations. I live in the Boston area and set my locations to sections of Cambridge and Boston (like Kendall Square, Central Square, and Kenmore Square) as well as regions of suburbs (like Route 1 and I-495 ring). You can adopt this scheme to your own area or develop your own. The final tab, Extras, lets you define the four features you most care about in a restaurant. These features will appear as checkboxes in the data entry and restaurant display modes and can be filtered on when looking through the database to decide where to eat. I'm sure you're all shocked that one of my four choices was whether the restaurant serves coke. I kept the free refills item from the defaults, changed takeout to delivery, and noted whether the restaurant has a buffet. Voila! Food is now personalized for my dining habits.

The copyright of the article Food in Palm Computing Devices is owned by Janice Karin. Permission to republish Food in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.