Mela Reader
A cross-platform recreation of the Mela recipe app so I could reach my recipes on the web, on Android and everywhere else.
Why
Mela is my favourite recipe app, and one of the best-designed apps on the Mac. It only runs on Apple devices, though. I wanted my recipes in a browser, on whatever machine was in the kitchen, and there was no Android version at all.
I also wanted a design challenge: could I recreate an app this polished, pixel for pixel, in Flutter?
What it is
A reader for Mela’s library that runs on the web, Windows, Linux and Android, alongside the platforms Mela already covers. It reads Mela’s own file format, so the same library opens everywhere with nothing to convert or sync. Recipes, collections, images and the three-pane layout all behave as they do in the original.
How I built it
Without access to the source code, I reverse-engineered the file format and rebuilt the interface from scratch, matching Mela’s typography, spacing and details as closely as I could. Flutter made the cross-platform part almost free: one codebase, every target.
What I learned
Recreating someone else’s design faithfully is a sharper exercise than designing from scratch. Every spacing decision has already been made, and you notice exactly how much of an app’s polish lives in details you would normally never look at.
