Development of the jquery version of the MarysMenu app.
Ready for a "live" test (though I haven't checked it live against a menu, just against a blurry picture of one, so the prices may be off.)
The people I eat with often get things from the dinner menu at lunch time too, so getting that transcribed is next. Other next steps should include:
At some point I should start soliciting additional menus (local to Cambridge, MA for now) and do some comparison testing on non-Android phones.
Much to my (probably inappropriate) surprise, the interface worked fine on my Android 1.0 phone. I separated the last bit of UI (the display of the total) from the data, added in the values I used in the native Android Java app (note: these are still inaccurate but they provide a richer example and a more fair comparison), added category headings with hide/show, and added "show just my order".
Next step would be to implement the current lunch menu, before the next time I'm there for lunch :-)
Two hours of hacking and exploration led to a really simple demo version of the Mary's Menu concept:
You should be able to just click on the first one to try it live.
Watched Dmitri Gaskin's Google Tech Talk on jquery, and it finally clicked - this is the right tool for the modern version of the MarysMenu app...
The other part the clicked was that http://phonegap.com/ could be used to turn this into a quasi-native app for both Android and iPhone with no further development work...