Exclusive Download: Dine-O-Matic 2
Anyone who's spent time in any major city will have inevitably run into the age-old conundrum of where and what to eat when they feel like going out. Chinese or Pizza? If you're going to do something Asian, why not that new Thai place? Even the most decisive of folks can be turned into blubbering infants when faced with so many options.
Things only get worse when you're eating with others. Steve likes Italian, but Joe really wants a Burger. Inevitably, someone isn't going to get their way, creating a rift between friends that will lie dormant until sometime in the future when it leads to the two of them never speaking to each other again. What we really need is an impartial Solomonic arbiter to assist us in these difficult decisions. Some kind of automated computing machine, perhaps…
Okay, so maybe choosing a place to eat isn't all that hard, but the upcoming Dine-O-Matic 2 from the Iconfactory can certainly add some spice to the otherwise boring weekday decision. Simply enter in the names and other information of your frequent haunts, and Dine-O-Matic does the rest– presenting you with a random choice of eatery at the click of your mouse.The addition of custom cuisine categories and the ability to add additional "weight" to your favorites are just a few of the upgrades to this already terrific widget.
Full changes include:
• Custom cuisine categories
• Enable / disable entire categories
• Expanded restaurant information
• Restaurant price filtering
• 'Weight' your favorite restaurants
• Google Maps and web integration
• Localized for these languages:
• German
• French
• Japanese
• Swedish
• Chinese (Simplified and Traditional)
Although version 2 officially goes public tomorrow, we've got it a day early exclusively for readers of PhillRyu.com. Check it out, and enjoy!
Update: Thanks to Mike over at TUAW and the guys at MacBytes for spreading the news!
Update 2: Now released on IconFactory.com.
Comments
Up until this point, there have been 15 responses to “Exclusive Download: Dine-O-Matic 2”:
I like the look of it, although I don't really know any addresses to try it out with...
Phill Ryu
No problem, Icon Designer, but thank Gedeon for letting me do this! (One of the head honchos at IF.)
And now, I'm hungry. Time to go find some grub.
Hey Thanks Phill! I'm loving the new features, though I don't think I'll be grabbing my friends throat when he chooses between me and someone else's idea for dinner. Nice little review! I'll be sure to try this out!
The spooky thing is that Dine-O-Matic reads my mind... 70% of the time, it presents me with the exact place I was thinking of... Excellent!
[...] Más información | PhillRyu.com [...]
Meh. I'm waiting until they have it so you can put in your zip code and it will just magically grab a list of all the restaurants in a 10-mile radius.
Please have them do that. If it did that, so many more people would use it (simply because we're all too lazy to add everything in manually).
Sorry, but this is a sorry concept, and a sorrier implementation. what kind of dork would use this software?
[...] Exclusive Download: Dine-O-Matic 2 [...]
Phill Ryu
I don't think you really get this Chief Hiawatha, or maybe you're just the kind of person who's never had a hard time deciding between a couple places to eat. 
The point of Dine-O-Matic isn't to randomly choose one place to eat from all the possible choices around you. Would it really be hard to choose between McDonalds and your favorite sub shop? No.
The point is that the widget chooses a random location from your *favorite* places to eat that you can't decide between. You want to go one place, and your wife wants a different place. Enter them both (plus others) and let the food fates decide where you are going.
Hope this helps.
does this help out canadians?
[...] Exclusive Download: Dine-O-Matic 2 - PhillRyu.com Simply enter in the names and other information of your frequent haunts, and Dine-O-Matic does the rest– presenting you with a random choice of eatery at the click of your mouse.The addition of custom cuisine categories and the ability to add additional “weight” to your favorites are just a few of the upgrades to this already terrific widget. [...]
Because the dinner ritual in my house frequently consists of the "I dunno, what do you wanna do" tango for hours on end, often until 11 PM, being able to store the business hours of each restaurant would be helpful in weeding out all the places that close at 9 PM. Or those that don't open until 5 PM, are closed on Sunday, and so on.
Almost a year later since the 1st post, I think you should port Dine'o'matic 2 for the iPhone, just as Iconfactory did with Twitterriffic. It's a far more interesting app, with a larger audience. You could "hook-up" with one of those zillions of recommendation/location-based review websites for the restaurant info and take care of the design part. Those neon food icons are yummy! and make the app free!
Icon Designer dot net
August 22nd, 2007 at 7:19pmExcellent release, and I must say it is a terribly clever concept. Thanks for releasing this to us early