Currently viewing “Exclusive Download: Dine-O-Matic 2”. Click here to return to the main page.

Exclusive Download: Dine-O-Matic 2

August 22nd, 2007 at 7:14pm • Posted in Mac Apps • Tagged Mac Apps

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 17 responses to “Exclusive Download: Dine-O-Matic 2”:

Icon Designer dot net

August 22nd, 2007 at 7:19pm

Excellent release, and I must say it is a terribly clever concept. Thanks for releasing this to us early :)

wphj

August 22nd, 2007 at 7:36pm

I like the look of it, although I don’t really know any addresses to try it out with…

Phill Ryu

August 22nd, 2007 at 8:07pm

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.

Kiro

August 22nd, 2007 at 8:38pm

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!

shadownight

August 22nd, 2007 at 8:39pm

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!

Dine-O-Matic 2: El nuevo widget de IconFactory, una forma divertida de elegir restaurante

August 22nd, 2007 at 9:07pm

[...] Más información | PhillRyu.com [...]

Maulsel

August 22nd, 2007 at 10:30pm

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).

chief hiawatha

August 22nd, 2007 at 11:57pm

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 « Daniel’s Blog

August 23rd, 2007 at 12:04am

[...] Exclusive Download: Dine-O-Matic 2 [...]

Phill Ryu

August 23rd, 2007 at 1:16am

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. ;)

IF Webmaster

August 23rd, 2007 at 1:57am

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.

madh

August 23rd, 2007 at 1:28pm

does this help out canadians?

Trip Hop Clan » Blog Archive » Dine-O-Matic 2 Say “NO” to “Where you wanna eat?” “Anywhere” loop

August 23rd, 2007 at 4:42pm

[...] 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. [...]

Jeff Jungblut

August 24th, 2007 at 2:02am

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.

Exclusive Download: Dine-O-Matic 2 « Apple News

October 30th, 2007 at 6:40am

[...] Exclusive Download: Dine-O-Matic 2 Although version 2 officially goes public tomorrow, Phillip Ryu got it a day early exclusively for readers of PhillRyu.com. Check it out, and enjoy![…] Thanks to Glenn for providing this nice story on Digg (more than 35Diggs). [...]

kevin c. kupillas

January 17th, 2008 at 12:06pm

Since we don’t keep straws in the house to draw the shortest from, this seems like a great alternative to the life-sucking, decision-making process that is “what’s for dinner?”. My ladyfriend and I are also plagued with the same routine every single time we want to go out. One of us tries to a) act like we’re doing the other a courtesy, and b) assume the role of the most relaxed person ever. “It’s completely up to you honey. Whatever YOU want to eat. Your choice. I really could eat anything. I’m COMPLETELY flexible. Really.”). This generally leads to both of us just sitting there claiming that we were the one forced to decide last time. In any case, we both suck. Thanks to those involved.

dean

June 23rd, 2008 at 10:19pm

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!


Leave Your Own!

Name

EMail

Website