"None" unit for Ingedients is unclear

[Dylan McCall]

When adding an ingedient, there is a combobox to select the unit. The first choice is "none", which makes sense for something like "2 apples." However, with that label, it looks like it will read as "2 none apples," which is pretty unclear.

[Jeff Fortin Tam (kiddo)]

I agree 100%. I thought I had actually filed the bug myself already :) This is especially confusing in conjunction with the fact that there is also "other" as an ingredient unit.

Dylan, do you have a suggestion as to how to make this more intuitive?

[Dylan McCall (dylanmccall)]

Nothing quick and clever springs to mind for me, unfortunately. Just changing "none" to an empty string feels okay as long as the default selection is something else (so people have an idea what the box with an arrow is for).

Now you have me going, that tab feels like it could be lots better from a design standpoint. It's kind of rigid and mechanical right now. (And the three widgets don't align very nicely).
Of course, it has to be to do all the cool things it does, but it doesn't feel as smooth as writing out ingredients on a piece of paper. It's all in the right order, but it's clunky to type in a number of ingredients, select the unit from a menu (!), then type in the description in three distinct steps. I wonder if a single really smart text field for each ingredient would be a nice thing to try. Allow only numbers in the first part, then after a space allow units to be entered (with, but not limited to, known units shown in an autocomplete popup), then after that allow anything.

An advantage to having a free text input for units is you can have an enormous database of units without stretching the user interface. (Autocomplete just showing the most likely 10 or so).

This could help if somebody is feeling like a super hero: http://library.gnome.org/devel/gtk-faq/stable/x842.html

All that is way out of scope for this bug report, though, and potentially a bad idea :)

[Jeff Fortin Tam (kiddo)]

Parsing the natural language is a pretty cool idea, but I wouldn't know
how to implement it myself. Also of importance in that case *letting the
user know* that a unit was properly recognized/parsed, and being able to
handle multiple languages. Maybe one could look at how GTG does it.

[Stevie Griffiths (kastevie)]

can't you just use a dash here so:
2 - Apples

It is used all over the interwebs to say that this combobox is not being used and seems to fit perfectly here.
Alternatively the word units fits here: 2 units Apples. Though I don't really like this option.

[Dean Sas (dsas)]

I think Dylans right, natural language processing sounds nice. IIRC gourmet does that. allowing you to type "2 tbsp of paprika". This is then parsed into three fields - "2" (quantity) "tbsp" (units) "paprika" (ingredient). It's not 100% but you can change the fields after.