Menu Planner App and Print Friendly Posts

No recipe post this week because I have lots of exciting news on menu planning and recipe posts in general.

Planning With Kids Menu Planner App

PWK Menu Planner App
I shared this photo on the Planning With Kids facebook page last week and was thrilled at the response.

I have teamed up with the clever techno folks at Ventiv to create the Planning With Kids Menu Planner App. The app is sleek, simple and easy to use. It will:

  • Come loaded with a selection of Planning with Kids recipes, including photos of the dish where available.
  • Let you create a weekly menu plan and associated shopping list.
  • Allow you to email the shopping list to yourself or others.

The release date is dependant upon approval from Apple, but with any luck it will be available before Christmas.

To answer some questions I know some of you will ask:

  • It is being released for iPhone first, but is being built on a platform which will allow us to later deploy it to iPad and Android.
  • It will be a paid app, but only a small price, less than a couple of dollars.
  • At first release you won’t be able to add your own recipes, but we hope to build that functionality in down the track.

I am super excited about the app, it will great to be able to menu plan on the go and have my shopping lists on the iPhone!

Print Friendly Posts

I have had a couple of requests recently from readers to add a print function on the blog, to enable easier printing of recipes. I had been looking into this and then when I read the first batch of feedback from the Planning With Kids Reader Survey, I was surprised at how many readers wanted this functionality!

Print Friendly Posts
Well I am happy to say that now, at the end of each post you will find a little green button like in the screen shot above, which will allow you to print out posts from the blog.

Print Friendly With Images
When you click the Print Friendly button you will have a screen pop up (if you block pop ups, you many need to allow them for planningwithkids.com so it works) like in the above screen shot. It automatically comes up in a format that includes images.

Print Friendly Without Images
If you prefer to print the post without images, simply check the box “Remove Images” as highlighted by the green arrow. You can even change the font size if you prefer it smaller or larger (blue arrow).

You then have two choices (yellow arrow), you can print it directly or save as a PDF file and then print it.

Print Friendly Choose Pages
If you choose “print” you will receive a screen that looks something like this. I use the Chrome Browser and this is what it looks like. If you use Firefox, Safari or Windows Explorer it will look slightly different, but should have the same functionality.

You can then choose which pages you want to print out (green arrow). For example on my recipe posts you may only want to print the first page and not bother printing out the menu planning component that would be on the second page. You can even choose double sided printing (blue arrow).

(At the final printing stage you will see some Google Ads, these ads are not from me, but they are part of the free plugin I have used to add the Print Friendly button.)

Let me know what you think of the functionality!

*****

Thanks to everyone who has filled the survey in so far. I am loving the feedback – my aim is to make Planning With Kids as useful as possible to parents and your thoughts will help me do that.