Last year, Evernote launched Food, an iPhone app to save photos and details of your favorite meals, which would then be synced to your Evernote account. Today, Evernote is launching Food 2.0, a major revamp that includes a native iPad app and a completely rebuilt experience focused on exploration, saving recipes, and browsing restaurants available in a specific area.

I have been able to quickly play around with a final version of Food 2.0, and I came away quite impressed by the effort put into this relaunch. I never got into Evernote Food, mainly because my girlfriend and I tend to save our recipes in dedicated apps, bookmark others we want to check out or simply keep a note with links to them, and because we use other services for restaurant reviews and recommendations. Being able to save a photo of a final meal — either made by us or someone else — didn’t hold much appeal against dedicated solutions. Evernote Food 2.0 wants to address exactly this issue by collecting in a single app, Evernote-style, recipes you can explore and “clip” (i.e. save in your Evernote account), while offering standalone views for restaurants and the meals you have already saved (and will continue saving) in Evernote Food.

The iPad app starts with a gorgeous horizontal wall of photos for Explore, My Cookbook, Restaurants, and My Meals. You can swipe to the right to reveal a napkin with the Evernote logo on the left, and tap on a section to view an “unfolding” animation open a specific section. I noticed that the speed of the animation took an extra second upon the first launch of the app on my iPad 3, but then went back to normal as I kept using the app. On the iPhone, the app uses the same vertical layout for sections seen in Evernote 5.0. (more…)

The App Store will soon be updated with a new “Food & Drink” category, according to developers of existing iOS applications who received an email from Apple today about the upcoming change. “In the next few weeks”, applications will be automatically migrated to the new category; currently, the App Store doesn’t provide a specific category for these types of apps, which have been typically listed under Lifestyle by their developers. According to Apple, the new category will include “apps that help users cook and bake, mix drinks, manage recipes, find new restaurants and bars, and learn what their friends like to eat and drink”. Food & Drink won’t include diet, grocery shopping, coupon clipping, or food-related game apps.

The new category is another change coming to the App Store, which Apple has been tweaking and revamping with new features lately. Ahead of a major redesign coming with iOS 6, Apple re-organized its selection of Editor’s Choice apps and App of the Week selections, providing a standalone category with weekly updates. Recently, Apple also started grouping previous game bundles into a macro category accessible from the App Store’s homepage.

The dedicated Food & Drink category comes after thousands of apps have been successful in using iOS devices as tools to manage recipes and find local restaurants. Notably, iOS 6 will also feature Yelp check-ins in the new Maps applications — a renewed focus on this area that will surely benefit from a new category on the App Store.

Currently, Apple only offers a custom Cooking section to showcase handpicked app selections for recipes, drinks, shopping, and reference material.

Update: the new category will appear “in the next few weeks” according to Apple.

Calories aren’t fun. No matter what kind of appreciation you have for food, watching what you eat while being a food-a-holic can be difficult when everyone else focuses on just the numbers. Eating should be about discovery. It should enjoyable, shared, and fun without making everything else out to be a dangerous game of cat and calories. In my opinion, it’s much better to be mindful of what you’re eating, and Foodish is exactly the kind of app that fulfills this desire very well.

Not only is Foodish wrapped in a beautiful user interface, it’s fun and simple to use. Based on good conscience alone, you simply snap a picture of your meals and rate them on a general “bad to good” scale that tracks your overall eating habits over time. The concept is great: not only can the foodie in you keep a record of all those great meals and memories, but it also keeps you aware of just what exactly you’re shoving into that pie hole. Plus, you get to totally brag about the incredible meal you’re having at that five start restaurant from within the app. It’s a win-win!

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Since the iPad’s release, we have seen several restaurants replacing printed menus with iPads, which provide a good solution to build an interactive experience for customers and save on the cost of paper and ink with a constantly updating menu that’s also cool to use. Digital menus, however, might become a thing of the past as soon as Stacked: Food Well Built launches its restaurant chain, heavily based on iPads to order and design meals.

As USA Today reports, the co-founders of Stacked aim at placing 100 iPads per restaurant atop every table, allowing diners to order meals using static menus or design their own burger, pizza or salad through the iPad’s intuitive multi-touch interface and a custom app built specifically for the restaurant chain. The setup:

The iPads at Stacked will be in metal frames that sit about 3 inches off the tabletops. Folks wanting to order burgers will select the type of bun, meat and toppings on the iPad by clicking and dragging icons. The burger stacks visually on the iPad screen. Ditto for pizzas and salads.

Oh, and what if you try to steal the iPad by carrying it out in your bag? An alarm will go off. This sounds like a really clever implementation (do they have custom doors with iPad recognition?) and marketing technique, although the founders claim they won’t market their chain as “the iPad restaurants”. Still, it’ll be interesting to see how the iPad will further integrate with restaurants, coffee shops and bars in the next years. iPad cash registers are already in place in New York City.

Remember this? That’s probably one of the weirdest…things that every showed up here on MacStories. A Japanese guy that thought eating off an iPad would be a good idea.

While we don’t recommend such an original usage (but hey, you can try!), we have to admit it was “particular” enough to deserve a post. If you’re looking for a way to use the tablet for cutting, and not eating, food, but you don’t want to ruin the precious Apple glass washed in unicorn tears — look no further than the iPad cutting board.

It’s laser cut from a chunk of wood, it’s got fake food icons on its “Springboard”, and the author wants to remind you that it can be used both in landscape and portrait mode. Also: the battery icon has been replaced with a bottle of wine.

The iPad Cutting Board is available here at 15 Euros (around $20). We think this deserves a spot on every Apple-themed Christmas dinner this year. For real. [TUAW via MyBrett]