Categorisation

I use Mela -- Recipe Manager on my iPad. It's a great app, I recommend it.

Once I'd saved a dozen or so recipes -- more than fit on a single screen -- I realised that I couldn't find things. It's the old computer science problem: naming things is hard.

Take one of the favourites, chicken shawarma. That's how I saved it, but in my mind I think of it as 'Lebanese chicken'. And so I can never find it.

A trivial problem indeed, but I think it serves as a nice example. Because exactly the same problem occurs whenever we save anything, anywhere. Did we call it 'chicken' or 'shawarma' or 'lebanese' or something else? All are equally valid, and we decide arbitrarily when we do the saving.

The solution, of course, is categorisation. As soon as I realised that I was becoming frustrated because I couldn't find a recipe, I looked for a categorisation feature in Mela and found it.

And so now I don't search for recipes. I browse categories.