[Because tells me I’ve been quiet lately, I guess I’m making up for the past two weeks of silence with all these posts this morning. 🙂 ]

Since I switched to using a Mac last November, I’ve had little difficulty finding good and sometimes much better replacements for the Windows software I’d been using, but I struggled with finding a suitable replacement for MasterCook. Recipe management software abounds for OS X, but few have the features I really came to rely on in MasterCook (good import/export to and from a variety of formats, unlimited categories for each recipe, good search capabilities, scalability to several thousands of recipes, nutrition calculation, meal planning, shopping lists, pantry management, etc), and nothing I found seemed to have all of those features.

Until yesterday, when I found A Cook’s Books. It has almost everything I need in some form or other, and since it’s still in beta, some of it will probably be improving, too. But what’s there is already solid. I used it for a few minutes and was totally sold. Bought it and was very happy.

After importing a huge amount of recipes (4800-ish!) and manipulating them, I ran into my first bug so I emailed the developer (it’s an unusually good beta product — the error messages actually include directions on where to email issues) describing the problem and saying something like “by the way, it would be GREAT to be able to do this in such-and-such a way” and within a few hours, he responded and let me know that the suggestion I’d made was actually in the next release and did I want to test it? So now I’m beta-testing the new-new version, and I’m flipping out loving it. I’m finding gems in my recipe collection that I’d forgotten all about or never noticed before, marking recipes that use the overly abundant cilantro in my herb garden, and flagging recipes that will be very handy once my huge crop of zucchini is ready this summer.

So anyway. I’m an obsessive cookbook and recipe collector, so color me a very happy obsessive. 🙂

If you love recipes, Macs, or software development, you’ll appreciate this

6 thoughts on “If you love recipes, Macs, or software development, you’ll appreciate this

  • May 25, 2006 at 9:58 am
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    That’s awesome. My mother used MasterCook under Mac OS 9, but hasn’t really used the computer for recipes since switching to OS X. I think I smell a Christmas present.

    Reply
  • May 25, 2006 at 11:59 am
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    Very cool! I wish I could buy a mac.

    I just got “The Complete Book of Indian Cooking” from an ex who is Indian. Sweet. Now to make a huge mess in my kitchen trying to follow recipes for things I’ve never tried to cook with before.

    Reply
  • May 25, 2006 at 2:45 pm
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    I’ll pass this over to Pooch to see if he is interested in it. Thanks!

    Reply
  • May 26, 2006 at 2:37 pm
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    That’s cool. I love Indian food. Let us know how it goes!

    Reply
  • May 26, 2006 at 2:38 pm
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    Cool! You’re such a great gift-giver. Have I ever told you Karsten calls the weather gadget the “ert-mometer”? Makes me giggle every time.

    Reply

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