Thursday, November 15, 2012

Review: Manzer Lakaz (Home Food), first Mauritian app for Windows Phone.




Today I’m writing about a special and unique recipe app called Manzer Lakaz – Home food in English. Manzer Lakaz was developed by a Mauritian thus making it the first app made locally that is posted to the Windows Phone Store for free. So let’s take a look at Manzer Lakaz.

The app opens up on the featured recipe of the day screen. You see the picture of the featured recipe and its name. Tap and you’re taken to the full recipe with the cooking time next to the picture.  Below is the list of ingredients you will need for the dish and easy-to-understand directions that will make sure that the dish will impress. The picture of the featured recipe will also show up on the live tile if you choose to pin it to the Start screen.

From the Featured recipe screen, swipe to the left to access the Explore screen where you will easily see the entirely list of recipes that the app has to offer or you can use the built-in filters to get the list of Dish Type, by Main Ingredients, By Cooking Method and By Cooking Time. The latter lets you filter furthermore with a choice of cooking time: 15mins, 30mins, 45mins, 1 hour and 1 hour 15mins. For example, the dishes that take longer to cook are Baked Aubergine and Beef Rougaille. This is good to know when planning.

The “By Dish Type” screen is quite interesting. The developer did a good job at making the navigation easy and intuitive. The dish Type screen is devised in such a way that it doesn’t necessitate a manual filter. It’s all there for you to peruse the 5 types of dishes at your leisure: By Appetizer, By Main Dish; By Side Dish; By Salad and by Desserts.

Again, the same experience applies throughout Manzer Lakaz. The “By main Ingredients” screen sorts dishes by Chicken, Fish, Beef, Pasta and vegetables. Same goes for the cooking method filter where you can choose between Boiling, by Simmering, by Pressure, by Grilling, by Baking and by Frying. No matter how and what you cook, it can be added to a favorite list for future reference. To do that, open a recipe and tap “Add favourite” on the menu bar at the bottom of the screen. Repeat the same steps from the Favorite window to remove the recipe from the list. Manzer Lakaz does fit well with the Windows Phone UI.

However, there are some features missing. It would be nice to have a Comment area for each recipe so users can also share their own tips or submit their own recipes. There are a lot of local dish that are missing in the app. But I’m sure more recipes will be added through future updates to showcase the rich culinary diversity of Mauritius.
All-in-all Manzer Lakaz is a nice and helpful app for people around the globe to use and discover Mauritian gastronomy. 

Manzer Lakaz was developed by Wasiim Hosenbocus.
Download link: Windows Phone Store

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