“I struggled with getting the whole recipe downloaded into my head,” he said.

“I would read the whole thing through, but pieces kept falling off — I needed a buffer,” he said, using a term for large caches of downloaded data that make a program run smoothly. “I kept having to go back to the page, and the interface was so difficult to manage.”

Mr. Huntley was becoming restless in retirement around the time Apple’s iPad was coming on the market. Accustomed to inventing alternate realities, he developed ways of presenting recipes on a screen. These strategies can be disorienting at first, but make enormous sense. CulinApp’s first product was Baking With Dorie ($7.99), the lively app from Ms. Greenspan, which was released this year.

Users can choose from four different ways of seeing each recipe. For novice cooks, a step-by-step view presents each recipe step in full screen, with a video of Ms. Greenspan doing what the text says (creaming butter and sugar together, for example, for her All-in-One Holiday Bundt Cake). Mr. Huntley also developed CulinView, a nonverbal way for a more confident cook to follow a recipe. After ingredients are measured and the oven heated, the rest of the process is shown in a flow chart, illustrated with bright images of mixers, whisks, ovens and ingredients. With arrows and color-coding, it sketches out the process for the more confident cook who already knows how to cream butter and sugar, say, but needs to be reminded what to do with the chopped apple and grated fresh ginger. SpinView puts the whole recipe on one page, with the option of scrolling through the steps. Finally, for the traditionalists, there is the Cookbook view, formatted in the old-fashioned way.

Mr. Huntley is not the only designer thinking about new ways to represent recipes in visual form.

“We are completely breaking these texts down to their data-rich components,” said Mark Douglas, a partner in Culinate, a food technology company in Portland, Ore., that produces the app for “How to Cook Everything” by Mark Bittman, the New York Times writer. “Then, we put them back together to make an app that feels the same, but better.”