These past months Smiling Plants has designed and developed iPhone apps for Kuoni Scandinavia's leisure travel brands Apollo (Swedish website) and Falk Lauritsen containing their last minute travel offers. Kuoni Scandinavia is a part of the Kuoni Travel group — one of the major players in the international travel industry. Their brands Apollo and Falk Lauritsen are two of the most popular leisure travel companies in Scandinavia.

The apps are designed around the user choosing their departure airport to see available last minute offers. By utilizing the iPhone’s built in location services, it's also possible to sort the list based on distance to the airports. 

When an airport has been chosen, all last minute offers are displayed listed by departure date, and if the user wants to find their dream trip, there’s an easy to use search bar. The user can also sort by best price, destination and more. Tapping an offer let’s the user book their trip without efforts directly in the iPhone’s built in Safari web browser.

The Apollo Norway app has been the 22nd most downloaded free app in the Norwegian App Store, and the apps for the other countries also reached top positions in the Travel category in their respective countries. The apps were covered both in social media and traditional press.

The apps are available on the App Store:

• Apollo Sweden
• Apollo Norway
• Apollo Denmark
• Falk Lauritsen

Ladies and gentlemen. It is my pleasure to announce to you, the launch of the first of Smiling Plants' products, Béchamel.

After having been in development for several years, Béchamel is finally mature enough for us to open the doors for a limited number of beta testers.

But let's take a step back. I'm sure some of you are wondering what in the world Béchamel is. Some of you may be wondering why we're launching a sauce. Don't worry though, the answer is provided.

What Béchamel is

In short, Béchamel is about food. Béchamel is a brand new internet community centered on food. Here users can post recipes, discuss food, plan their meals and make shopping lists. Many food related web sites either focus a lot on editorial content, or product placements. Béchamel focuses on it's users.

We believe that it's time for users to have their recipes center stage, not just lurking around the edges.

How to get access to Béchamel

Initially Béchamel will only be open to a limited number of beta testers. However, we haven't filled all the beta tester spots, so we'll be giving away invites. Send us an e-mail at info@smillingplants.com. First come, first serve applies. Also, we'll be responding manually, so don't expect an immediate answer.

As you may well know, we are currently working on a project called Béchamel, an online food community. If you haven't already, we recommend that you read our page on Béchamel before reading the rest of this preview, to learn a little bit more about it.

This tour will consist of a lot of screenshots, and I think it's about time we get going.

First up, when you first arrive at Béchamel, you will be greeted by a screen much like this one. Here you can see what's happening in the community, and of course, log in.

Once you've logged in, this page looks slightly different. The way we see it, if you're logged in, you probably have some idea about what Béchamel is, and therefore we also show you things that are more relevant to you, your upcoming meals, new recipes posted by your friends, responses on the forum and comments on your recipes.

Let's take a look at one of the recipes. As you see, you can add beautiful images of the recipe, something that we very much encourage. You probably noticed the image immediately, because of how it differs from the rest of the site's design. This is a conscious design decision, we want to put a lot of focus on the beautiful images.

Let's look at another recipe as well. We support several kinds of metadata to the recipe, difficulty, how much time it takes to cook it, tags and user ratings. These ratings are one of the factors used to calculate the popularity of recipes.

If you scroll down a bit, you'll see the comments for the recipe, and if you're logged in you can add new comments.

Next, we move on to another feature, planned meals. Here you can plan your week, food wise. As you see, today I plan to have Spaghetti alla Bolognese di Magnus, and tomorrow I'll have Baked Macaroni and cheese, and kladdkaka for dessert. This planning is also used in the shopping list, so that you can easily add all items needed for your upcoming meals.

As with any community, your profile is important. It's how other people get to know you. First off, we have some quick facts, all of these are of course optional and then a description. We certainly hope that you'll write a lengthy description of yourself. Of course, your description doesn't need to be a cheap rip-off of the introduction to John Hodgman's excellent book The areas of my expertise, but if it is, I won't blame you.

And now, the last stop of the tour. Searching. While this may seem a bit uninteresting, it is hands down the best way to find recipes, or users for that matter. We use an advanced engine for indexing our recipes (if anyone is interested, it's Lucene), which makes finding what you're looking for easy. Also, note the save search link. If you are a Connoisseur member, you can save searches and get a feed or emails for new recipes matching the search.

Finally, while we do not have a screenshot for this yet, we are making an announcement. If you are a Connoisseur, Béchamel will be available in a special optimized version for the iPhone. If you're in the store, wondering what to eat, take out your iPhone, and find recipes easily. Your shopping list will be easily available on the iPhone, making the need for notes or even printed lists from Béchamel unnecessary. Easier for you, and good for the environment.

Since Magnus sprouted the first entry of this blog by telling us about some of the technical stuff that's behind our new website, I guess it's time to talk about the more fluffy side: design and user experience.

When we talked about how we wanted the design of smilingplants.com to be like, we both agreed that we wanted something clean and quite minimalist (hey, we're from Sweden). It may not be the most inspiring or compelling design on the web, but we are pleased with the result and we think that it will suit our purpose for some time.

The theme of minimalism is also visible on this blog, which we as you may have noticed named Where things grow. We have some small details that we really like, for example that a user who has made a comment sees a thank you message directly with a link to the comment feed for that particular post. We believe that it's more convenient for the user to track possible coming comments by a feed than by e-mail because we believe the mental impact of an e-mail is higher than an entry in a feed. That way, you don't have to overly concern your self with comments that may well be uninteresting to you.

Don't dare to write a comment but still want to see how it looks like? Well, see below:

Of course we follow best practices when it comes to URLs. We have made them both user friendly and optimized for search engines. For example, a URL to a blog post contains a maximum of five words (we don't like long URLs) and if they don't give a lot of meaning, like 'and', 'of' and 'the', they're not visible in the address.

Finally, after a lot of hard work, we are ready to present unto you the official Smiling Plants web site. As you can see, we have this awesome and beautifully designed blog and we have a web publishing system for the rest of the site.

Actually at the time of writing, everything isn't exactly finished, but we want some text on the site before we launch it :)

We also have some awesome features on the site that you might like if you, like me, are a programmer. Like syntax coloring for code in a wide variety of languages. So if I need to set some young whippersnapper right here on the blog, you can be sure that it'll be done in syntax colored goodness :) How do we get all these fancy features? I'll let you in on a little secret. We use a framework called Symfony and an ORM called Doctrine. They allow for rapid development, and there are already plenty of fancy plugins it. The syntax coloration for example comes from sfGeshi, and the publishing system is an as of yet unreleased Doctrine port of sfSimpleCMSPlugin, made by yours truly.

Of course, you might still have questions to ask, like "Hey, mister, then why did the site take so long to complete?"

If you were to ask that question, you could be certain that the answer would be something like "Well, young lad, it's because I've mostly been working with our first big project, Béchamel, which you'll be seeing a lot more of soon, and we figured that there's not really any point in having a web page with pretty much no relevant content on it."