Consider the food diary app a friend uses; it allows you to add a meal so that you can simply select that meal and to add a bread to it for that meal.
Implementing this functionality requires setting up a meal table, detailing the food, connecting it to calories, creating a form, and programming the logic for “had one more bread”—a lot of work, at least a month or 2.
In contrast, the Plang app, FoodDiaryApp, offers this functionality for free. 🆓
FoodDiaryApp listens for user input, you can simply send a message like “ham and cheese sandwich,” and it will figure out the calories, carbs, fat, protein, etc. 🥪
I just tell my app to create a shortcut, “es,” for a meal. “es stands for 2 eggs and salad, with spinach, 2 tomatoes, cucumber.” 🥗🍳
So, when I send “es,” the app knows exactly what that meal includes.
With just two letters, “es,” you’ve logged your meal and received all necessary information—a great example of ‘Job to be Done’. 🎯
For the programmers
What’s interesting is that you can create variables. For instance, if you say “3 es,” the user would define it as “Xes (case insensitive) equals x eggs and salad, with spinach, 2 tomatoes, cucumber, where X represents the number of servings, with the default being 2 eggs per serving. Example: ‘3es’ = 3 servings of eggs and salad.” And we just made sure it’s not case sensitive. 🔢
What’s cool here is that we’re programming logic directly into the knowledge entry. This means each app is designed by its own user, each app personalized. It uses the variable ‘X,’ without the need for special syntax, just a bit of algebra. 🔄
Check out the FoodDiaryApp repo, read the .goal files 📖
Plang repo is for more Plang
And the website is https://plang.is 🌐
