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Show HN: My side project for splitting restaurant bills

22 points by spoletto 15y ago

korussian 15y ago
It looks like a fantastic app - very intuitive. I get that this is a side project, but is the restaurant bill splitting problem a real problem that needs a better solution? You made such a nice looking, well thought-out app that I think you could be doing a great job of solving real-er problems. If I could make stuff like you do, boy howdy...
- spoletto 15y ago
  Thanks for the feedback! I'm working on other problems as well, but this was a real pain point for me last semester. I'm a senior in college and eat out in groups quite frequently. It's always a real pain when the check comes and everyone seems to have forgotten basic math. I made an iOS app for myself to solve the problem, and then my friends Ivy and Nicholas convinced me to polish it and put it on the app store. So hopefully other people find it useful too!
dclaysmith 15y ago
How good is OCR on the iPhone? It seems the ideal solution would be: 1) Take a picture of the bill, 2) It gets split up into items and amounts 3) Select a user and 4) select all of the items that they are responsible (or split if necessary). Great looking site. Good luck.
- spoletto 15y ago
  I experimented with Tesseract OCR: https://github.com/rcarlsen/Pocket-OCR/ https://github.com/rcarlsen/Pocket-OCR/ In my field studies, I found it was not very reliable. Text recognition would often fail even on printed receipts. Also, several of the restaurants I went to used hand-written receipts. So I ultimately decided against OCR. If it had worked well, I do think it would be a nice feature for the app.
bjtitus 15y ago
This looks like a great solution to a problem I run into fairly frequently! I usually use something like Soulver to do the quick calculations but it quickly becomes difficult if everyone has ordered items at drastically different costs.
- spoletto 15y ago
  Glad to hear it! Let me know if you have any feedback on how it works!
charlesriccardi 15y ago
This app is really great. It has already been incredibly useful.

22 points by spoletto 15y ago

It looks like a fantastic app - very intuitive. I get that this is a side project, but is the restaurant bill splitting problem a real problem that needs a better solution? You made such a nice looking, well thought-out app that I think you could be doing a great job of solving real-er problems. If I could make stuff like you do, boy howdy...

spoletto 15y ago
Thanks for the feedback! I'm working on other problems as well, but this was a real pain point for me last semester. I'm a senior in college and eat out in groups quite frequently. It's always a real pain when the check comes and everyone seems to have forgotten basic math. I made an iOS app for myself to solve the problem, and then my friends Ivy and Nicholas convinced me to polish it and put it on the app store. So hopefully other people find it useful too!

dclaysmith 15y ago

How good is OCR on the iPhone? It seems the ideal solution would be: 1) Take a picture of the bill, 2) It gets split up into items and amounts 3) Select a user and 4) select all of the items that they are responsible (or split if necessary). Great looking site. Good luck.

spoletto 15y ago
I experimented with Tesseract OCR: https://github.com/rcarlsen/Pocket-OCR/ https://github.com/rcarlsen/Pocket-OCR/ In my field studies, I found it was not very reliable. Text recognition would often fail even on printed receipts. Also, several of the restaurants I went to used hand-written receipts. So I ultimately decided against OCR. If it had worked well, I do think it would be a nice feature for the app.

bjtitus 15y ago

This looks like a great solution to a problem I run into fairly frequently! I usually use something like Soulver to do the quick calculations but it quickly becomes difficult if everyone has ordered items at drastically different costs.

spoletto 15y ago
Glad to hear it! Let me know if you have any feedback on how it works!

charlesriccardi 15y ago

This app is really great. It has already been incredibly useful.