Greetings,
I do a lot of grilling, and more important, slow smoking of ribs,
brisket and pork and other great meats. (It's times like this I feel
sorry for the vegetarians out there.) But, one of my biggest
problems was getting a meet and grill temperature reading during the
cooking process. About a year ago, I noticed a product called iGrill
by iDevices Inc. The url is http://www.igrillinc.com/ that had a
wireless bluetooth digital thermometer and iPHone/iPod/IPad
application. I instantly downloaded the free app, to see how well it
worked with voiceover, and was disappointed. Last week, I noticed an
update for the app that included a bug fix bullet item reading
"improved voiceover support". I downloaded the app and checked it
out. Things looked very very promising, but I didn't have the
hardware. That all changed with a recent UPS delivery. I'm very
pleased with their progress, and feel it is a very useable solution
with most features accessible, and I'm sharing my review here.
I opened the box and it came with a base unit, two temperature
probes, and batteries. Without reading a thing, I was able to
install the batteries, and plug in the two probes. The front of the
unit has three touch sensitive buttons. Not my first choice for a
blind user, but they are dimpled and distinguishable. At this point
I ran the iGrill application on the phone and listened to the getting
started instructions. The three buttons are power and plus and minus
The plus being above the minus and the power being to the left of
those two. However, other than the power button, the device can be
controlled entirely from the iOS application, so you really don't
need to worry about the plus and minus buttons on the unit.
As instructed by the online documentation accessible via the
application, ,I pressed all three buttons to enable the device to
pair, and sure enough, in Settings, General, Bluetooth, on my iPhone,
the iGrill showed up and could be paired.
.
The key to this product is in the iGrill application, a free
download from the Apple App Store. In the iGrill app, there are Four
major button tabs. Cooking, Tools, INfo and Settings.
The "cooking" button is where you have access to the remote
temperature probe data. If the device is off an not paired, this
section will read not connected. If the iGrill is on, you will see
readable data on two probes with current temperature, user defined
label, and alarm label. Flicking works perfectly and all data seems
easily and quickly accessible. You can rename the two probe labels
to anything you wish. Since I smoke, meat, I have one labeled as
meat and the other as grill. Logical examples might be fish or
chicken. The device comes with two probes designed for food. An
ambient temperature probe for grill surface can be purchased
separately. What I was stunned and pleasantly surprised to see, was
that there are a slew of predefined temperatures for a range of foods
that you can pick from that have the right temperature already
defined. Want that tuna the right temp, pick tuna. Want a chicken
done just right, select chicken. And, you may add your own items to
the list. Basically, this is a Label with a target temperature. All
totally accessible and properly labeled with voiceover tags. Now,
what's nice for the smokers out there, you can also specify a
temperature range. Smokers generally like to keep their grill
temperature between 225 and 250, and for any probe, you can specify a
target temperature or a range of temperatures. The target temp will
alarm when the probe hits that temperature. The range temperature
will alarm when the temperature goes above or below that range. Both
the target and range temperatures work great.
My only complaint on the cooking tab is that for both probes you have
the option of facebook and twitter buttons. In my opinion, a waste
of space. Just because you can integrate easily with social media
via the iOS API doesn't mean you should. At the very least, I wish
the buttons would go away of you don't have a twittter or facebook
account. Maybe they'll read this review and make it a preference.
I'll save my diatribe for the insanity of facebook for another post.
The Tools tab has three items: Timers, Graph, and Globe. The Timer
section allows you to create either count up or countdown timers.
Unfortunately, the UI for this feature is not Voiceover friendly.
You can create a number of named timers, but picking the time is done
through a horrid number of button items. And the granularity is only
to the minute, not second. Basically, you have to scroll through
page after page of 60 buttons, one for each minute between 0 and 60,
plus buttons for hours. It's the craziest UI I've seen for a time
entry field. Popup picker items, or simple text field entry areas
would have been much more useful as well as voice over friendly. I
would say the Timer area is not practical for voiceover users, but
the inclusion of a Timer at all, is a feature that goes above and
beyond the core functionality of the product.
The next item is Graph. This is not useful for voiceover users,
since it shows the temperature over time visually. A great feature
for smokers who can see, but you can export the data to a csv file
and email it to yourself. But within the app, the raw table data is
not available or voiceover friendly.
The last item is Globe, and this is more social media from what I can
tell, but I will not review it since I do not participate in those
things for privacy and identity theft risk.
The third main tab is Info. This has Links to video guides on
youtube for the iGrill. There is a slight incompatibility with
voiceover in that if you double click on the popup video item from a
picker selection list, it does not launch. For some reason, you have
to pick it and then close the picker with the done button, to have
the application send you to youtube to see the video. This is where
you can learn about the features of the iGrill as well as have access
to phone and email support and the iGrill store.
The last tab is Settings, where you can select your preferences
regarding sounds for the alarms, how you wish to see the degrees in C
or F. And finally see the version of the iGrill app itself.
Overall, the iGrill by iDevices provides a totally accessible two
thermometer probe unit that works with voiceover with your iOS
device. It absolutely solved a problem that I have, and I suspect
others out there might appreciate this product. The lack of
usability for some features that are beyond the core features of the
device seem less important. I was able to take the device from box
to grill without any assistance. What I can't speak for now is the
battery life or how the product will hold up over time.
The list price of the device is $80 and the Ambient probe is an extra
$20. I found mine at amazon.com for about $72. In my opinion, they
should bundle a version with one food probe and one ambient probe for
the smokers out there, but I think overall, the device is a useful
product that works well with voiceover. I'd recommend this product
for people who cook and want to know the temperature of their food
and grill or oven.
The bottomline: I like it and it works well with voiceover. I
suggest you read sighted reviews on amazon for additional details,
but the voiceover side is working well for me. The negatives include
the lack of a physical on off switch and the use of touch sensative
buttons on the device, and some extra features of the application are
not voiceover friendly.
Overall I think it's a great product and demonstrates how a
mainstream product and iOS app that's coded with accessibility in
mind can solve a problem for both sighted and blind user alike.
Hope you found this post useful.
--Scott
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