We’ve uploaded the beta version of our first Facebook application called Food Dial. FoodDial is not just a book of recipes. Here’s the big idea – you came back home, tired and hungry. Start the Food Dial application and open the fridge…Here’s the red pepper.  Turn the dial with food categories (we assume that you know that red pepper belongs to veggies). Drag it inside the dial (a.k.a. table), and you’ll see all recipes that include red pepper as ingredient of a recipe. Keep going…Found an onion? Drag it in. Now, the recipe list shows only those recipes that use both red pepper and the onion.

You can browse and upload your own recipes, rate and tag them with further filtering using the tag cloud on the right. There is the area for ads under the tag cloud, if say a medical doctor wants to advertise her services for those who are interested in recipes for diabetics.

For us, this application is a proof of concept, our first experiments with Facebook. The client portion is  developed it using Adobe Flex, the server side is taken care of by Java under Tomcat and MySQL Server DBMS. We also wanted to show that Farata Systems is not only about developing rich but boring Internet applications for enterprises, but we do stuff for fun too.

If you have Facebook account, search for this application by entering Food Dial in the search box. If you don’t, just visit this URL: http://www.myflex.org/fooddial/FoodDial.html

This application is in beta – we’d love to hear your suggestions to improve the Web design of Food Dial. So far it looks as typical Flex application. What would you change to improve its usability? All ideas are welcome.

Please add this application to your Facebook profile. Help us to see the viral nature of social networks in action.